As we conclude the discussion on the business intelligence perspective, lets review how this perspective applies to the business analysis knowledge areas.
The business intelligence perspective aligns with the business analysis knowledge area in numerous ways including the following :
1 Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: The business analyst may need to set up an foundational data infrastructure to assist or improve the solution based on the infrastructure of an existing solution.
Scope Modelling is regularly used to decide between these alternatives and plan the important business analysis activities appropriately.
In planning the initiative, the business analyst should consider the following:
- How experienced the stakeholders are in communicating their requirements in the business intelligence context.
- How experienced the business analysts are in documenting those requirements for business intelligence technical specialists.
- That the business intelligence solutions usually provide frameworks, tools, and techniques that can support requirements definition and solution modelling.
- That the level of stakeholders’ and business analysts’ skill can have an effect on the planned approach.
- That the business intelligence solution that combines numerous data sources usually engages many stakeholders with converging information requirements.
2 Elicitation and Collaboration: The cross-functional nature of business intelligence usually demands business analysts to use specialized documentation tools and techniques to elicit requirements from the stakeholders, both business and technical.
Individual stakeholders may only have limited knowledge and expertise
in regards to :
- The business decisions that require support.
- The data components that support those business decisions.
- The data sourcing, transformation, and merging rules.
- The presentation of the needed information.
Interviews with individual stakeholders would help identify the information and analytic insights needed to support their decision making.
Workshops with stakeholders from across divergent functional areas of the business can also help identify common, intersecting requirements that would be better met with an consolidated solution.
Commercial off-the-shelf business intelligence applications can provide the business analyst with a set of highly effective prototyping tools to elicit and illuminate stakeholder requirements.
3 Requirements Life Cycle Management: The business intelligence discipline requires setting up the infrastructure capabilities in the solution.
This can cause structural dependencies within the solution, that could influence the order of individual business needs. But efficiencies can be achieved by implementing related requirements concurrently.
4 Strategy Analysis : Business analysts can use high-level abstract data models to map the current state of the organization, spot information silos, and analyze their related problems and opportunities.
Organization Modelling can be used to assess any current data management infrastructure, such as metadata management and data governance.
In describing the future state strategy, the business analysts can use high-level models to plan the architecture for data storage, data transfer and data transformation.
These models include the following :
• Logical data models: these models provide a stable view of the solution architecture, showing the information gateway that connects the sourcing of operational data inputs with the delivery of the business information outputs.
• Data flow diagrams: these models are usually used to plan the lively features of the solution and to identify other architectural set ups such as latency and accessibility.
• Decision models: these models are used to describe how important business decisions are made and where and how data analytics can be successfully used to meet these needs.
• Physical data models: these models are used to show the implementation environment including the data warehouse and data marts.
5 Requirements Analysis and Design Definition: Models of an existing system’s data can help define data availability and spot redundancies, inconsistencies, and data quality issues.
A future state data model can show how the source information is organized in the proposed solution.
The business analysts are also involved in evaluating the capability of a proposed solution in regards to the specified requirements.
7 Solution Evaluation: Stakeholders who are not aware of the capabilities of business intelligence might focus on simply replacing or repairing the existing information outputs.
The business analysts should investigate and assess opportunities for additional value that are enabled by a business intelligence solution.