Business Intelligence systems are designed to help organizations understand their operations, customers, financial situation, product performance, trends and a host of key business measurements. Good BI system allows quality decisions to be made. Similar, bad decisions can be resulted from poor decision making. Over the last decade, I see alot of effort being spent on tools. We’ve seen the rise of portals, web analytics, widgets, BPM, EPM you name it. In fact, how many millions of dollars have companies spent with the promise of report automation and hundred of hours saved from replacing manual Excel reporting? When I go to different companies, what I see are more manual reporting, not less. I see multi-billion dollar companies still don’t have their dream BI system. How’s this possible? The answer is simple.
They lacked Data Governance. It’s difficult, what is Data Governance? In the next few weeks or months, I will get into more about Data Governance. At high level, how do we know the reporting we do will be blessed throughout the organization from top to bottom? Isn’t it almost a trend that many BI projects are done in silo and the reporting that they do are obsolete the moment it’s developed? When organizations don’t have Data Governance in place, employees have free-rein on developing reports based on their own version of truth. Nothing is certified or certifiable.
Here’s an example: the Media BU finance team produces a European P&L is different to the European HQ producing their Media business P&L, and this is different to Corporate Finance producing the Europe Media P&L. The three organization namely BU Finance, Region Finance and Corporate Finance are silo organizations that have the function to engage in management reporting. However, without a “Playbook” called Data Governance, they’ll likely be developing reports using business definitions, business rules, timeline that are different to one another. Think of how many years the SEC and the AICPA have been developing reporting standards to govern how transactions should be booked or reported. Yet within the realm of management reporting, there’re no rules.
This is the main reason why companies will never yield the expected benefits from their large spent on BI.
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- MDM Institute
- History of Hyperion
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- Tracking Changes – Part II
