In addition, the corporate BI team builds a universal semantic layer of shared data objects (i.e., a semantic layer) that it makes available within the corporate BI tool. Although business units may still use their own BI tools, they increasingly recognize the value of building new reports with the corporate BI tools because they provide access to the standard business objects and definitions that they are required or highly encouraged to use. The business units still hire and manage their own BI developers and assemblers, but they now have dotted-line responsibility to the corporate BI team and are part of the BI Center of Excellence. This is the architectural approach used by Intuit (see
Part 1 of this series).
Centralized Business Intelligence – Shared Service
Some organizations, like Dell, don't stop with a shared platform model; they continue to centralize BI operations to improve information integrity and consistency and squeeze all redundancies and costs out of the BI pipeline. Here, the corporate BI team manages the entire BI stack and creates tailored reports for each business unit based on requirements. For example, Dell's EBI 2.0 program (see
Part 2 of this series) reduced the number of report developers in half and reassigned them to centralized reporting teams under the direction of a BI Competency Center where they develop custom reports for specific business units. The challenge here, as Harley-Davidson discovered, is to keep the corporate BI bureaucracy from getting too large and lumbering and ensure it remains responsive to business unit requirements. This is a tall task, especially in a fast-moving company whose business model, products and customers change rapidly.
Summary
Federation is the most pervasive BI architectural model, largely because most organizations cycle between centralized and decentralized organizational models. A BI architecture, by default, needs to mirror organizational structures to work effectively. Contrary to popular opinion, a BI architecture is a dynamic environment, not a blueprint written in stone. BI managers must define an architecture based on prevailing corporate strategies and then be ready to deviate from the plan when the business changes due to an unanticipated circumstance such as a merger, acquisition or new CEO.
Federation also does the best job of balancing the dual need for enterprise standards and local control. It provides enough uniform data and systems to keep the BI environment from splintering into a thousand pieces, preserving an enterprise view critical to top executives. But it also gives business units enough autonomy to deploy applications they need without delay or IT intervention. Along the way, it minimizes BI overhead and redundancy, saving costs through economies of scale.
Wayne Eckerson has been a thought leader and consultant in the business intelligence (BI) field since 1995. He has conducted numerous in-depth research studies and is a noted speaker and blogger. He is the author of the best-selling book Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. For many years, he served as director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) where he chaired its BI Executive Summit and created a popular BI Maturity Model and Assessment. Wayne is currently director of research at TechTarget and president of BI Leader Consulting, which provides advisory services to user and vendor organizations. He can be reached at weckerson@techtarget.com.
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