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What You Should Know About Business Intelligence – This Isn’t the Same Profession

When You Started

Lewis F. McLain, Jr.CityBase.Net, Inc.

Finance RoundtableNCTCOG

March 9, 2012

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/the-history-of-business-intelligence.aspxwww.citybase.net/downloads/gfoatroundtable.ppt

Disclaimers & Credits

Slides that have the Collin College and KnowledgeFlight logos are the property of Tim Smith, a Collin College Instructor and Co-Founder of KnowledgeFlight Consulting. They are being used with permission.

Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence are terms that incorporate a huge array of topics, concepts and practices. This presentation is intended to just introduce a small portion of the subjects.

Hey, if you are a small shop and your accounting system is QuickBooks and your BI tool is constrained to Excel (bless your heart!), you can still benefit from this presentation.

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How to Make A Lot of Money

Charge people for using the word “Sustainability” if they can’t be specific about what they mean.

Charge people who use the words “Smart Growth” if they can explain it without using the word “Smart.”

Charge people who use the words “Business Intelligence” and can’t explain the process.

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The BI Train is Leaving the StationAre You on IT?

An Assessment of the Accounting Profession

Record. (A+)

Classify. (A-)

Summarize. (A on required, D on elective)

Analyze. (D)

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New York Times Best Seller List

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What’s Happening Here?

Legacy OLTP Systems are Loaded with Years of Unanalyzed Data. Incredibly Powerful User-Oriented Analytical Packages are Rushing

to Us at Reasonable Prices. Business Oriented Council Members are Using BI Tools in Their

Jobs. Many are being provided by iPads by the City. You are at Risk for Others Telling You about Your Business. College Students are Graduating with New Talents, Skills,

Interests, Expectations. Some IT Departments and Some Fiscal Departments are Learning

about Collaboration and Data Knowledge Management. Every Leading Software Package of the Future has or will have BI

Features. You May Think You Can’t Afford the Time, Effort & Money for BI,

but You May Not be Able to Afford to Ignore IT.

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A Big Part of the Challenge – the Lingo

BI – Business Intelligence. OLTP – Online Transaction Processing. OLAP – Online Application (Analytical) Processing. SQL – Structured Query Language. SQL Server – Software Product to Store & Retrieve

Data. DW – Data Warehouse. ETL – Extract, Transform and Load. Flat File – Text, Comma Separated Values (CSV). OLE DB – Object Linking & Embedding Database

(SQL, Access). ODBC Open Database Connectivity. DBMS – Database Management Systems.

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A Big Part of the Challenge – the Lingo

SSMS – SQL Server Management Services. SSIS – SQL Server Integration Services. SSAS – SQL Server Analytical Services. SSRS – SQL Server Reporting Services. SME – Subject Matter Expert. ODS – Operational Data Store. Schema – Data/Table Structure & Relationships. Metadata – Data About (Descriptive, Structural &

Administrative) Data. BICC – Business Intelligence Competency Center. Grain – The Level of Detail (Granularity).

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How Many Data Sources Do You Have?

Core Accounting System. Utility Billing System. Municipal Court System. Project Accounting Systems. Human Resource Systems. Recreation Program Systems. Library Systems. Police Dispatch Systems. Dozens More. But What About Those (hundreds, thousands?) Side

Excel Spreadsheets and Access Databases that Only One Person Understands?

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Business Analyst

• Information Ombudsperson.

• Is a communicator. Especially in written forms. Presentations.

• Willing to learn how departments work.

• Knows what managers want, especially the city manager.

• Knows what the council wants.

• Knows the core system tables and relationships.

• Knows how to extract from those systems.

• Knows how to put together management reports.

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Envision the End Result (Dashboard) andWork It In Reverse

• This data is wrong.• This data is too old to be meaningful.• This data needs to be consolidated.• This data needs to be broken down.• This data needs better labeling.• This data is too brief.• This data is too summarized.• This data is too detailed.• This data is not mine.• This data is incomplete.• This data should not be shown outside this department.• This data is pretty, but I still don’t know what it is telling me.• Who thought of this stupid BI idea?

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Multi-Dimensional Cube

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Municipal Court Revenue Dimensions

• Statutory Changes. • Police Department Leadership.• Police Officer Staffing and Efforts.• Weather Conditions.• Day of the Week.• Time of Day.• Geographical Considerations.• Municipal Court Staffing.• Municipal Court Judge Decisions.• Warrant Officer Staffing and Effectiveness.• Fine Rate Structure.

• = Revenue

“The trend is your friend … until it bends at the end.”

Hold The (BI) Train!

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• Extract from data sources.• Look for missing data.• Look for duplicates.• Error corrections that did not get to history files.• Deal with abbreviations, periods, commas, spaces.• Standard spelling of names.• Standard IDs for employees, vendors, etc.• Pivot or unpivot data.• Index, sort.• Deal with historical changes in systems.• Deal with historical reorganizations.• Load into data warehouse.

ETL Components

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What is a Business Intelligence Competency Center • Is a cross-functional entity for organizations that embrace BI as a strategic need and require a greater return on their investments and continued success of their BI plans.

According to Gartner, the BICC consists of 4 main pillars:• User Training (communicating the technology through varying mediums)• Data Stewards (data ownership, data cleansing)• Meta Data (identifying the source and impact of changes to data)• Advanced Analysis (why it happened, what might happen, take BI to the next level)

BICC

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• The success of a BI initiative (and/or project) needs to be measured and compared against set objectives.• BI projects require repeatable processes, common terms, planning tools, templates, and best practices.• Measurements should be established to track and monitor the value of the BICC and its performance reported back to the stakeholders of the BI strategy.• The BICC needs to be a cost center generating value with its associates being part of project teams.• The stakeholders should set a utilization number for all members of the BICC team.

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• Most organizations think of BI in terms of constructing a data warehouse and deliver reporting. • But we know we need to support:

•Traditional Ad-Hoc queries•Traditional operational reports•Online Analytical Programming (OLAP)•Scorecards/Dashboards•Data Mining•Forecasting and Planning•Statistical Analysis•Predictive Analytics•Business Rules Based Alerts• Knowledge Management

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As a formal entity within the organization, the BICC is mandated to provide value in the following areas within the 4 main pillars:

• Provide BI/DW expertise (all pillars).• Generate new BI/DW projects (advanced analysis).• Assure that all projects include a BI/DW component (meta data, advanced analysis).• Market the BI/DW role within the company (user training).• Be the advocates of BI/DW (user training, data stewards).• Ensure on-going analysis of existing solutions within the enterprise (all pillars).

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The diagram below depicts the ideal roles and responsibilities associated with the BICC function (Source: SAS Institute).

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• Project Management • Business Analysis (requirements, metric definition, measurement)• IT Delivery (report and scorecard design, ETL mapping)• Business Knowledge• BI and DW Technology & Architecture• Data Modeling (Schemas), Metadata• Bus Diagram• Analytical Experience• Education & Training• BI/DW mentorship & promotion

Skills and Knowledge

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• Project Management.• Business Analysis (requirements, metric definition, measurement).• IT Delivery (report and scorecard design, ETL mapping).• Business Knowledge.• BI and DW Technology & Architecture.• Data Modeling (Star Schemas), Metadata.• Analytical Experience.• Education & Training.• BI/DW mentorship & promotion.

Roles, Resources, and Knowledge

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• Delivery also includes post-project measurement. • The BICC must also be responsible for the adoption program and a put in place procedures to capture varying measurements related to project acceptance. • These can be automatic through auditing features and reports whereas other techniques may involve user canvassing. • Measurements must be captured and reported to the stakeholders.

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A useful delivery method is a BICC scorecard capturing the following items:

• Projects Success Factors (on time, on budget, level of engagement – hours and resources, PMO success factors).• Report Usage (usage, refreshes, speed of execution)• Data Usage (dormancy).• Application Usage (log-on counts).• Training program statistics (how many people trained) • Data Volumes (counts, daily loads).• Internal Seminars.• Knowledge Management Contributions (Wiki’s, Webcasts).

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Category Project Assessment Industry Success FactorsBusiness Benefit Clear Value Understood Clearly Understood by Business Sponsors,

SME's, and ITBI/DW Funding Limited Strong DW/BI investment in resources and

toolsetInformation Delivery Currently Excel Based Information available at all user-level

communitiesDW Delivery Non-Existent Complete BI/DW foundation regarding Best

Practice Design, Implementation, Testing, and Deployment

BI/DW Adoption by User Community

Non-Existent Technology embraced and supported at all levels

Data Management

Stewardship or Process Non-Existent

Has clearly defined processes, procedures, and governance of data

Data Quality Data for POC needs validation

Data is validated and reported through all aspects of the ETL Framework

SDLC Good Strict SDLC migration environments (Development, Test, QA, and Production)

Project Management Excellent Complete PM Methodology Adopted

Staffing Availability Available resources Availability of sponsors, SME's, Support, and Development staff are available and contributing

Staffing Expertise in DW Implementation and Methodology

Current resources will need extensive training

All BI/DW Roles are clearly defined, with highly-skilled staff assigned to project.

As with writing a project charter, the following areas must be defined for the BICC ; • Executive Summary – overview.• Mission – purpose of the BICC.• Vision - future expected state due to the existence of the BICC.• Stakeholders – reporting structure.• Mandate – governance of BI/DW projects, stewardship, metadata capture.• Deliverables – specific needs from projects to the BICC.• Approvals – sign-off authority on the deliverables, projects.• Appendices (if necessary) – additional information pertaining to the BICC (various artifacts).

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Project Charter

A full training program should include;

• A calendar of conferences and seminars.• A calendar of classes for technologies including SQL Server, Integration Services, Data Quality, Metadata tools, Data Modeling tools, Performance Point Server Monitor and Analytics.• A matrix of which users should attend which technology• List of books, magazines, and web sites that deliver BI/DW knowledge.• Library of white papers, books, webinars, webcasts.• List of local user groups, brown bag sessions, invited speakers.

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Training

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The initial set of BICC artifacts must be created to include;• Checklist to identify whether a SOO contains a BI/DW component• Project template identifying tasks and general durations for those projects requiring an ETL and/or reporting need• Template and Wireframes for reports and sites• Metadata capture template• Data Stewardship template and a list of data owners• Requirements gathering template• Data Modeling guidelines including naming standards, techniques for star schema creation, existing conformed dimensions list, tools for modeling, etc• Reports & ETL testing scripts and guidelines• Various ancillary documents such as ETL data maps, glossaries, security needs, scorecard needs, etc

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Artifacts

The formal orchestration of people, processes and technology to enable an organization to leverage data as an enterprise asset.

Focused on managing the quality, consistency, usability, security, and availability of information. Closely linked to the notions of data ownership and stewardship.

Data Owners – individuals that often belong to a business rather than technology division and are in a position to obtain, create and have significant control over the data

Data Stewards – individuals who ensure that adequate, agreed-upon quality metrics are maintained continuously and that there are data quality improvement programs within the organization.

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Data Governance and Compliance

• Regulations for compliance and intelligent data reporting• Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, Patriot Act, Basel II, FDA CFR 11, Gramm-Leach-Biley Act.• Increased consequences for non-compliance .

• Risk Management is a necessity.• Secure data.• Detecting problems in a tight timeframe with ability to respond quickly.• Timely delivery of information.

• Garbage in = Garbage out is still true.• Expanding global markets.• Data is mobile.• Data has an external market value.• Demand for Single Version of Truth.

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Data Governance and Compliance

•Streamlined Processes.•Transparency and Visibility.•Integrated Systems.•Secure Data.•Lower Cost of Ownership.•Efficient and Effective Use of Resources.

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Data Governance and Compliance

Integrity - Data Governance participants will practice integrity with their dealings with each other; they will be truthful and forthcoming when discussing drivers, constraints, options, and impacts for data-related decisions. Transparency - Data Governance and Stewardship processes will exhibit transparency; it should be clear to all participants and auditors how and when data-related decisions and controls were introduced into the processes. Audit-ability - Data-related decisions, processes, and controls subject to Data Governance will be auditable; they will be accompanied by documentation to support compliance-based and operational auditing requirements. Accountability - Data Governance will define accountabilities for cross-functional data-related decisions, processes, and controls. Stewardship - Data Governance will define accountabilities for stewardship activities that are the responsibilities of individual contributors, as well as accountabilities for groups of Data StewardsChecks-and-Balances - Data Governance will define accountabilities in a manner that introduces checks-and-balances between business and technology teams as well as between those who create/collect information, those who manage it, those who use it, and those who introduce standards and compliance requirements. Standardization - Data Governance will introduce and support standardization of enterprise data. Change Management - Data Governance will support proactive and reactive Change Management activities for reference data values and the structure/use of master data and metadata

*Per the Data Governance Institute

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Data Governance Principles

•Design and refine “future state” business processes with both IT and business leadership collaborating on it•Determine value of data and calculate probability for risk associated

•What is it worth; Where is it; How is it used; Where and when to integrate it and federate it•Risk will determine how much should be spent on controls and protection

•Define a data governance process•Initial data load•Data refinement•Standardization•Aggregation•Elimination of duplicate records•Creation of linking and matching keys

•Design, select and implement a data management and data delivery technology suite

•Defining your Data Architecture•Role of SOA and integration•Measuring and selecting data cleansing, auditing, etc. tools

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Data Governance Strategies

• Enable audit-ability and accountability for all data under management that is in scope for data governance strategy

•Provides verifiable records of the data access activities•Serves as an invaluable tool to help achieve compliance with current and emerging regulations•Creation and empowerment of roles…assign data owners and data stewards

• Don’t underestimate efforts needed for data quality•Data preparation, validation, extraction, transformation and loading…could take as much as 75% of the data warehouse development effort•Over 50% of these activities could be spent on cleansing and standardizing the data•Need complete and clear semantic definitions of what the data is supposed to represent, in what form and with what kind of timeliness requirements…typically stored in a metadata repository•Data quality tools and technologies

• Assess level of maturity for data governance categories and then build plan and vision for moving to higher levels.

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Data Governance Strategies

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Data Governance Strategies

•Enable better decision-making •Reduce operational friction •Protect the needs of data stakeholders •Train management and staff to adopt common approaches to data issues •Build standard, repeatable processes •Reduce costs and increase effectiveness through coordination of efforts •Ensure transparency of processes

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Data Governance Goals

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Data Methodologies

Master Data Management (MDM)The authoritative, reliable foundation for data used across many applications and constituencies with the goal to provide a single view of the truth no matterwhere it lies.

Customer Data Integration (CDI)Processes and technologies for recognizing a customer and its relationships atany touch-point while aggregating, managing and harmonizing accurate, up-to-date knowledge about that customer to deliver it ‘just in time’ in an actionable form to touch-points.

Master Data Integration (MDI)Process for harmonizing core business information across heterogeneous sources, augmenting the system of record with rich content by cleansing, standardizing and matching information to provide high data quality in supportof a master data management initiative

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Steering Committee

• The Steering Committee must assume and/or delegate the following responsibilities:• Formation and Continuance

•Develop, maintain and follow a formal group charter and bylaws

• Identify Data and Application Integration Opportunities•Review whatever existing BI components are to ensure that they continue to be optimal. This will include the monitoring and analysis of activity so that bottlenecks are eliminated or reduced and opportunities for enhancement can be identified and acted upon•Listen to the “voice of the user” by receiving and processing change requests from those affected by implemented BI solutions•Receive and process change requests from external users, such as partners, customers, etc.

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Define Business Intelligence Opportunities•Understand opportunity-specific dependencies, timing, alternatives and risks•Define organizational/operational costs and impacts•Combine opportunities where appropriate•Detail the impact of external dependencies•Define solution alternatives and estimate implementation costs for each•Ensure that each solution alternative complies with BICC principles and designs•Create cost/benefit scenario(s)

Prioritize Opportunities•Alignment with strategies•Business priority•Technical priority•Economic benefit•Risks and alternatives•Decide which opportunities are justified to be executed as projects

Steering Committee

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Steering Committee (Roles)

Roles Responsibilities

Chairperson Approves, declines or postpones Projects presented by the Steering Committee

BICC Manager Chairs Steering Committee meetings and is responsible for presenting Projects to the Chairperson; oversees BICC projects and that their costs are contained and benefits realized

Communications Facilitates communication with the various stakeholders and functions as the Steering Committee’s secretary

LOB Representatives Represents the general business interests of their respective business segment or function

Information Technology Represents the general IT interests of their respective IT groups

Architecture SME Ensures that solutions proposed are consistent with the overall architecture and spirit of the BICC initiative

Infrastructure SME Ensures that infrastructure of the solutions proposed can be efficiently supported

Data Steward (DS) responsibilities include:• Definition and sourcing of the data elements to which they are assigned• Establishing data management quality criteria and routines• Mitigating quality out-of-bound conditions• Population and maintenance of their respective metadata

Quality assurance checklist includes:• Attribute data types are appropriate to their contents; e.g. numeric attributes are stored in numeric, not character, fields• Attribute values are all within valid ranges• Capitalization, abbreviation, etc, of text attributes (e.g. place names) are consistent throughout the dataset• Temporary attributes used only in construction of the dataset have been removed• Features all have 'reasonable' locations (e.g. all soil samples occur on land)• All feature or cell/pixel attributes contain values (or documentation explains why some values are null, zero or blank)

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Steering Committee

•Metadata, or “data about data,” allows organizations to create a map of their data terrain.

•Organizations can leverage this map on an enterprise or a project level to understand, manage, and integrate data more effectively. •Metadata describes how information assets and processes are derived, the fundamental relationships between them, and how they are used.

•It is the linkage between technical and business metadata, and tracks all the dependencies within the enterprise, holding the definition of where and how data is used, what happens when it is moved, and what it becomes in the source environment.

•It has been estimated that 66% of data warehousing efforts fail and the leading cause is improper metadata management. No wonder Ralph Kimball, considered one of the fathers of data warehousing writes “Metadata isn’t important – It’s everything!”

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Metadata Management

Technical Metadata

• User report and query access patterns, frequency and execution time • The system of record feeding the database(s)• Mappings and transformation from the system of record to the database(s)• The data model, both physical and logical • Database table names, keys and indexes • Database table structures and table attribution • Job dependencies • Program names and descriptions • Security

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Examples of Metadata

Business Metadata

• Data structures as known to the business user (friendly names and descriptions).• Table names and their business definitions.• Attribute names and their business definitions.• Field mappings, transformations and summarizations.• Database refresh dates.• Tagging Names used for search.• Taxonomy.

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Examples of Metadata

Informal Metadata

•Data Stewardship.•Business Rules. •Business Definitions. •Transformations and Summarizations.

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Examples of Metadata

A metadata repository catalogs the information defined above, which can then be utilized to identify redundancies and to eliminate duplication that already exists.

Improves data quality by providing a full understanding of the data.

Structured metadata provides visibility by various users, be they business, technical or even systems and applications, into subjects such as structures, relationships, business and data quality rules and performance.

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Examples of Metadata

Metadata provides business benefits in the areas of both cost reduction and revenue enhancement:

• Lowers development costs.• Drastically reduces redundant data.• Drastically reduces redundant data processing.• Lowers impact of staff turnover.• Increases business user productivity.• Speeds time-to-market by reducing cycle times.• Aids in the support of quality decision-making.

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Examples of Metadata

Data Lineage:• Used as audit trails for governance- and compliance-related tasks or as a contextual baseline to verify the status of IT implementations. Provides capability to record and trace the movement of data and data relationships. It shows changes in metadata including schema, table, index, and other definitions and context.• The data lineage include following activates:• Setting up interface to audit the metadata to

• Track Usage – Who is Using, What is Used.• Track or trace movement of data.• Track and indentify performance problems.• Track data definition, frequency of updates and relationship

• Setting up predefined Reports on metadata.• Setting up interface to run ad-hoc queries against metadata repository.

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Processes

Data Stewardship:

• The Data Stewardship helps in oversight on business conditions derived from unified data analysis. It starts with the standardization of business vocabularies and data dictionaries across data sources. Data stewardship then enables the most relevant abstraction to be presented to various users—from developers to IT management, from auditors to executives. • The data stewardship include following activates:• Setting up reports for Data Analysis to

• Discover Under Utilized Objects.• Discover miss-use of Data Definition. • Discover violation of business rules defined.

• Setting up data governance practice to• Proactively respond business challenges.• Exploit new opportunities and mitigate potential risks.• Enable automated review and analysis of data landscape.

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Data Stewardship Roles

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Project Management

Initiate Project During the project planning phase of projects that will span a significant length of time or involve many people, it is important to define the objectives, assumptions, and constraints of the project.

Start the Project Plan After the initial planning, you can create your project file, enter your preliminary project data, and attach your planning documents to the file.

Define Project DeliverablesAfter you establish the objectives of your project, you define the actual product or service that meets those objectives.

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Define the Project

Define Phases and TasksAfter you determine the work involved in your project, you can organize it into milestones, phases, and tasks and enter it into a project plan.Show Projects OrganizationAfter you outline tasks, you can also show the structure of your project by using built-in or customized work breakdown structure (WBS) codes or outline codes.Estimate Task DurationCalculate a realistic schedule for you, often based solely on task durations and task dependencies that you enter.Schedule Project TasksAfter you enter the task durations, it's time to address how those tasks are related to each other and tied to specific dates.Create Relationships between projectsBy creating task dependencies between the tasks in different projects, you can evaluate the effects of changes and activities in one project on other projects.

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Plan Project Activities

Estimate Resource NeedsAfter you determine the work involved in your project, you can organize it into milestones, phases, and tasks and enter it into a project plan.

Build the Project TeamAll of your resources were identified, approved, and procured. Now you can build your team by entering the resource information into the project plan.

Assign Resources to TasksNow that the resource information has been entered into the project, you can assign resources to the specific tasks you set up as the work of the project.

Other Project Assignments.Make sure to assign resources to multiple projects.

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Plan for and Procure Resources

Estimate CostsCost estimating is the process of developing the approximate resource and task costs needed to complete the project

Define Cost and Budget BaselineAfter you enter cost rates, you can save them as your budget before you start tracking and managing the plan. Also, you may want to attach important notes about budget decisions, share the budget information with others, or transfer information to other file formats.

Prepare Manage CostsAfter establishing costs, you can make the necessary preparations for tracking and managing them to ensure that the project stays within budget. You can specify a start date for the fiscal year, control the calculation options, and determine when the costs are payable.

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Plan Project Costs

Plan for QualityBefore a project begins, identify the quality standards that are necessary to achieve project objectives.

Plan for RiskIdentifying, planning for, and reducing risk at various times during a project can help you to keep the project on schedule and within budget.

Prepare Manage CostsAfter establishing costs, you can make the necessary preparations for tracking and managing them to ensure that the project stays within budget. You can specify a start date for the fiscal year, control the calculation options, and determine when the costs are payable.

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Quality and Risk

Setup methods for communication project planSet up a method for communicating with the project team and keeping the project up-to-date.

Create RostersCreate a list of resources and contact information with regards to the project. Add roles and responsibilities.

Plan for Issue EscalationDefine the issue escalation and resolution process.

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Communication

Optimize the Project PlanAfter building your project plan, you can review and fine-tune it to ensure that you meet the scheduled finish date.

Optimize ResourcesAfter building your project plan, review the allocation of your resources to optimize their workloads. Schedule Meetings at the right time to allow for productivity.

Optimize Plan for BudgetReview the planned costs in your completed project plan to ensure that they stay within your budget.

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Optimize the Plan

Manage CostsYou manage costs by keeping costs within your budget. Costs are all of the resources required to carry out a project, including the people and equipment that do the work and the materials consumed as the work is completed.

Monitor CostsBy reviewing the basic cost information for your project on a repeating basis, as well as performing a more detailed analysis of cost information, you can help to ensure that your project's financial success.

Manage ResourcesManage your resources by tracking their progress, identifying and resolving allocation problems, managing shared resources, and reporting the project progress to stakeholders and team members.

Track ProgressThe most effective way to gauge the progress of resources' work on a project is to balance their workloads and track the progress on tasks.Identify Resource Allocation Problems By reviewing the resource information, such as assignments, over-allocations or under-allocations, resource costs, and variances between planned and actual work, you can verify that the resources are optimally assigned to tasks to get the results that you want.

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Optimize the Plan

Resolve Resource IssuesTo get the best performance and results from resources, you need to manage their workloads to fix over-allocations and under-allocations.

Manage Information About Shared ResourcesAfter you add enterprise resources, review or change shared resource information to make sure that your project is as flexible and cost effective as possible.

Manage ScheduleManage your project by identifying problems, fine-tuning the schedule, and reporting its progress to stakeholders and team members.

Identify Schedule ProblemsAs you track the actual progress of tasks, you can review your schedule to identify problems or potential problems with task schedules.

Put Tasks on Back of ScheduleIf you identify problems in your schedule, you can use a variety of strategies to manage your project schedule.

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Optimize the Plan

• Requirements gathering techniques provide the project team members with a choice of methods for eliciting needs or requirements from stakeholders and for validating requirements with stakeholders.

• Certain techniques are appropriate in gathering stakeholder needs, while other techniques are most helpful in defining high-level and detailed requirements, or validating detailed requirements with the stakeholders

• Common Approaches• Interview (Q&A).• Brainstorming (Mindmaps).• Joint Application Development (JAD) Sessions.• Survey and Questionnaire.• Brownbag Sessions (sticky notes).• Storyboarding and Prototype (worth weight in gold).• Proof of Concept.• Use Cases.• Use a combination approach.

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Requirements (Brainstorming)

• NCTCOG is not just talking about BI, we are making it happen.• Plans are being assembled to teach BI principles and tools to every level of management in the organization beginning in May 2012.• We are anticipating that we will offer a fee-based BI training series to the region by Fall 2012. Will evolve over three years.

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Plans at NCTCOG

Group/LevelManagement

(City Managers, Assistant City Managers, Analysts,

Other Support Staff

Subject Matter Experts(Fiscal, Public Works, Public Safety, Parks &

Recreation)

Information Technology & Analytical Tools

(SQL Server, IBM Cognos, QlikView, Others)

Orientation/Roundtable

X X X

Basic X X X

Intermediate X X (selective) X

Advanced X X