Product Description

Provides a complete methodology for everything from strategic planning to the selection of new technologies and the evaluation of application releases. A visual guide to developing an effective BI decision-support application. Softcover. CD-ROM included.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159939 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

From the Back Cover

"If you are looking for a complete treatment of business intelligence, then go no further than this book. Larissa T. Moss and Shaku Atre have covered all the bases in a cohesive and logical order, making it easy for the reader to follow their line of thought. From early design to ETL to physical database design, the book ties together all the components of business intelligence."
--Bill Inmon, Inmon Enterprises

Business Intelligence Roadmap is a visual guide to developing an effective business intelligence (BI) decision-support application. This book outlines a methodology that takes into account the complexity of developing applications in an integrated BI environment. The authors walk readers through every step of the process--from strategic planning to the selection of new technologies and the evaluation of application releases. The book also serves as a single-source guide to the best practices of BI projects.

Part I steers readers through the six stages of a BI project: justification, planning, business analysis, design, construction, and deployment. Each chapter describes one of sixteen development steps and the major activities, deliverables, roles, and responsibilities. All technical material is clearly expressed in tables, graphs, and diagrams.

Part II provides five matrices that serve as references for the development process charted in Part I. Management tools, such as graphs illustrating the timing and coordination of activities, are included throughout the book. The authors conclude by crystallizing their many years of experience in a list of dos, don'ts, tips, and rules of thumb. The accompanying CD-ROM includes a complete, customizable work breakdown structure.

Both the book and the methodology it describes are designed to adapt to the specific needs of individual stakeholders and organizations. The book directs business representatives, business sponsors, project managers, and technicians to the chapters that address their distinct responsibilities. The framework of the book allows organizations to begin at any step and enables projects to be scheduled and managed in a variety of ways.

Business Intelligence Roadmap is a clear and comprehensive guide to negotiating the complexities inherent in the development of valuable business intelligence decision-support applications.

0201784203B02112003

About the Author
Larissa Moss is founder and president of Method Focus, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in business intelligence and data warehousing. She is a frequent lecturer and speaker at conferences in the United States, Europe, and Asia on data warehousing, project management, development methodologies, and organizational and cultural issues. Her articles on these topics are regularly published in magazines such as DM Review and Journal of Data Warehousing. She is coauthor of Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, 2000) and Impossible Data Warehouse Situations (Addison-Wesley, 2003). She is a senior consultant at the Cutter Consortium and one of the authors of their Business Intelligence Executive Reports.

Shaku Atre is president of Atre Group, Inc., a Santa Cruz, CA based consulting organization specializing in business intelligence and data warehousing implementations. She is also the president of Atre Associates, Inc., a systems integration company based in New York City. Previously, she was a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, held a variety of management and staff positions at IBM, and served as a faculty member of IBM's prestigious Systems Research Institute. She has authored hundreds of articles as a columnist for Information Week, Computerworld, eWeek and a number of other publications. She is the author of five books including Data Base: Structured Techniques for Design, Performance, and Management, Second Edition (John Wiley & Sons, 1988) and Distributed Databases, Cooperative Processing, and Networking (McGraw-Hill, 1992).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Many organizations are already well equipped to implement successful business intelligence (BI) decision-support applications, such as data warehouses, data marts, and other business analytics applications. However, during our consulting and teaching engagements, we have encountered many ill-equipped organizations as well. We observed some common factors among them, which we address in this book:

• Lack of understanding of the complexity of BI decision-support projects
• Lack of recognizing BI decision-support projects as cross-organizational business initiatives and not understanding that cross-organizational initiatives are different from stand-alone solutions
• Unavailable or unwilling business representatives
• Unengaged business sponsors or business sponsors who have little or no authority due to their low-level positions within the organization
• Lack of skilled and available staff as well as suboptimum staff utilization
• Inappropriate project team structure and dynamics
• No software release concept (no iterative development method)
• No work breakdown structure (no methodology)
• Ineffective project management (only project administration)
• No business analysis and no standardization activities
• No appreciation of the impact of dirty data on business profitability
• No understanding of the necessity for and the usage of meta data
• Too much reliance on disparate methods and tools (the “silver bullet” syndrome)

BI project managers and project teams can use this book to improve their project life cycles. They can also use it to obtain the appropriate recognition for their BI projects from the business community and to solicit the required support from their executive management. BI project team members and the business representatives assigned to them can use this book to gain a better understanding of the development effort required to build and deploy successful BI decision-support applications.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

Business Intelligence Roadmap is a guide for developing BI decision-support applications. The two main purposes of this book are to

1. Explain the complexity of BI decision-support projects
2. Present a step-by-step guide for the entire BI project lifecycle

Complexity

In order to give you an appreciation of the complexity of BI decision-support projects, we describe all of the components that go into a BI decision- support development effort. For example:

• You should know what makes a BI decision-support application different from a traditional decision-support system so that you can avoid costly mistakes.
• You should understand the infrastructure components of your new BI decision-support application, such as the tools available (for development and for access and analysis).
• You should be able to recognize items that could impair the success of your new BI decision-support application.
• You should determine how many resources you need and what type of resources, both technical and human.
• You should decide on the design or architecture of your BI decision- support application, such as designing for multidimensional reporting or ad hoc querying.

Step-by-Step Guide

Our step-by-step guide across the breadth of a complete development lifecycle includes activities, deliverables, roles and responsibilities, dos and don’ts, and entry and exit criteria, plus tips and rules of thumb to lead you to a successful BI decision-support implementation. For example:

• You should choose which steps you ought to perform on your BI project because no two BI decision-support projects are exactly alike.
• You should know whether to start with a cross-organizational decision-support solution or a tailored departmental solution with the basis for expansion.
• You should understand the sequence in which to perform development activities, that is, which ones can be performed in parallel tracks and which ones have a strong dependency on one another.

In contrast to topic-specific materials available on BI, this book is a single-source development guide written specifically for BI decision-support applications. The guidelines presented in this book are based not only on our personal experiences but also on some of the best practices covered in topic-specific books, articles, and Web sites.

HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED

All software development projects are complicated engineering projects, as demonstrated by the breadth of topics covered in this book. Chapter 0, Guide to the Development Steps, explains the general organization of the development guidelines in Business Intelligence Roadmap.

This book is organized into two major parts. Part I, Stages and Steps, describes the 16 development steps, which are introduced in Chapter 0. Part I gives you a broad understanding of the development effort involved in BI decision-support projects. Part II, At a Glance, supplements the text contained in the first part of the book with several matrices that should be used together as a reference guide for all BI decision-support projects.

Part I: Stages and Steps

Part I begins with Chapter 0, Guide to the Development Steps, and is followed by 16 development chapters. Each of the 16 development chapters is dedicated to one unique development step and describes the effort required to perform the activities of that step.

Guide to the Development Steps (Chapter 0) describes the general layout of the development guidelines presented in this book, contrasting those guidelines with a traditional development methodology. It discusses the six engineering stages as well as the three parallel development tracks, and it groups the applicable development steps under both. Chapter 0 explains the application release concept and shows how to organize a BI project with the appropriate roles and responsibilities for the core team and the extended team.

Each of the development steps (Chapters 1-16) begins with an individual chapter overview followed by a section called Things to Consider. These are general questions BI project teams usually contemplate when deciding which activities need to be performed under each development step. These questions are merely presented as “food for thought” and are not necessarily explored in the chapters; nor are they all-inclusive. Each chapter discusses the main topics applicable to the development step covered by that chapter. Some topics apply to more than one development step, such as testing or product evaluation. However, to avoid redundancy these common topics are covered in only one chapter and are only briefly referenced in the other chapters.

Each of the 16 chapters contains a list of major activities for that development step, accompanied by a figure showing what activities could be performed concurrently. The list of activities is followed by descriptions of the deliverables resulting from these activities and the roles involved in performing these activities. Each chapter concludes with a brief discussion of risks to weigh in case you decide not to perform that step on your project. Do not interpret the risks of not performing the step to mean that every BI project team must perform every development step exactly as suggested. Instead, use the risk section to determine whether the activities in that development step are—or should be—mandatory on your project. If they are not, you may decide not to perform some or all of those activities after discussing the risks with the business sponsor.

Part II: At a Glance

Part II contains the following matrices.

• The Human Resource Allocation Matrix (Chapter 17) lists all the vital roles involved in performing the step activities, tasks, and subtasks. The roles listed in this matrix need to be assigned to project team members. In order to help you discover and avoid potential resource allocation problems, the steps that can be performed in parallel and their appropriate roles are listed together.
  
  
• The Entry & Exit Criteria and Deliverables Matrix (Chapter 18) indicates the prerequisites, results, and deliverables for each development step. Not every BI project team will need to perform all activities for all development steps. This matrix should help you determine whether you can skip a step or incorporate some of its activities into other steps.
  
  
• The Activity Dependency Matrix (Chapter 19) is a collection of activity dependency charts for the development steps. This matrix shows at a glance which activities in each step can be performed concurrently. It should be used to determine workflow and task assignments for project team members.
  
  
• The Task/Subtask Matrix (Chapter 20) itemizes all pertinent tasks, and in some cases subtasks, for all the major activities under each step. This matrix should be used to prepare the work breakdown structure for the project plan. You can customize (expand or reduce) the tasks and subtasks on an as-needed basis for individual projects.
  
  
• The Practical Guidelines Matrix (Chapter 21) presents three subsections for each development step: Dos, Don’ts, and Tips and Rules of Thumb. Dos point out best practices for the development steps, and Don’ts instruct you how to avoid traps and pitfalls. Tips and Rules of Thumb are our personal collection of experiences over several decades of developing cross-organizational decision-support applications.
  
  

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

We suggest that all core members of the BI project team make use of this book as follows.

1. First, read all the chapters in Part I to gain an overall understanding of all the components of BI decision-support development.
2. Next, compare your own BI project scope and requirements to the topics in the book. Use the discussions in the chapters to decide which specific development steps apply to your project.
3. Go to Chapter 18 and look up the entry and exit criteria fo...

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Customer Reviews

Very action oriented
Very action oriented. The prose is concise and to the point. A key feature is that at the start of each chapter is a ticklist of action items to do or at least be aware of, for that chapter's topic. This may have value to you, from a management viewpoint. Also similarly useful are the extensive tables at the back of the book, that complement the ticklists.

For me, the most relevant sections were those describing metadata and how this is commonly defined and used by people in the data mining/business intelligence community. I enjoyed the description of a metadata repository/silo as a navigation tool.

The book is readily accessible to a nontechnical manager. There is little mathematical jargon, and there are clear explanations of common data mining techniques. Enough so that you can converse intelligently with personnel in that field. A strength of the book is that is lets you understand and direct a technical team, in a top-down fashion, driven by business imperatives, rather than by technical capabilities.

A Must for Every BI/DW Professional
It is refreshing to read a book that presents in-depth techniques for developing a BI application from cradle to grave in a continuous evolutionary process. Various matrices and WBS samples in Part II of the book serve as a quick reference for iterative planning and delivering of decision-support systems.The authors have done a phenomenal job in integrating business, technical,and management aspects of a BI and decision-support system to present an exhaustive set of guidelines.

After working with numerous clients and having read Inmon's Building the Data Warehouse, Kimball's The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit as well as various BI white papers, I know that data ETL and data warehouses are a major part of any BI strategy. However, after reviewing the summary of over 20 BI related books, I found that the primary focus of many BI books is normally limited to data presentation and analytical layers only.This book is an exception .

I would recommend this book to expert as well as novice DW/BI professionals alike, who may be business users, data analysts, architects, project managers, statisticians,or executive stakeholders.

This map covers a lot of territory
This book is impressive in its scope! Starting with the business justification of the project, Moss and Atre emphasize requirements, metadata, and extraction/transformation/ and load. In each chapter is a good overview, things to consider, relation to other steps of the plan, and a clear list of deliverables and the personnel (the roles) involved in each of the steps. Each chapter also offers rules of thumb that could only have been come from someone experienced with setting up a Business Intelligence Solution. Perhaps most important to a project manager tempted to cut out a step, is a warning about the risk of omitting the step.

Each chapter should NOT be thought of as an in-depth analysis of the topic (for example, there are just 4 pages discussing the star versus the snowflake schema when discussing database design), but rather as a map of the steps that need to be done. I was particularly impressed with the metadata discussions, which emphasize testing of the metadata repository, the role of metadata in navigation and context-sensitive-help at the element level, and the use of multiple sources to generate the metadata. The common emphasis on reviews, involvement of the business sponsors, and testing throughout the process was great! The discussion on three parallel development tracks seemed optimistic, as I was not sure that the application track is completely independent of the Extraction/transformation/load steps until the final implementation step. The book probably also should have emphasized security earlier in the process. This book offers a good plan, and I would be happy if our Business Intelligence projects followed the plan laid out here!!