SUBU

Business Intelligence (BI) Infrastructure
By Pavan Inabathini

The same post can be found at Government Shared Services

A BI infrastructure consists of 3 main pillars:

Data – Without data, what’s the point of business intelligence? There are 2 types of data that go hand in hand.

• Data captured from your business processes and needed for performance metrics.
• Standard definitions and descriptions of the data and performance metrics that is being captured.

The second, standard definitions (and associated business rules), is often overlooked when organizations design a business intelligence system. Without standard definitions, days in one report mean business days but in another report it means calendar days depending on who authored the report. This creates seeming inconsistencies that cast doubt on the integrity of the data and undermines the shared services’ organization’s reputation for transparency.

Information Delivery – This pillar addresses how the information is delivered to the user of the data. It relates to the usability and functionality of the user interface needed to consume and analyze the information. Self-service functionality is absolutely critical for a robust business intelligence infrastructure. Users must be able to search, create, analyze, and share information and insights any time, any place. Without knowledge of the underlying query language.

Information Security – This pillar addresses the need to secure the information while making the information available to users on a need to know basis. There are a few key challenges that must be overcome in this area

• User management – an audit process must be in place to ensure information is being delivered on a need-to-know basis. Access to information should be restricted by the user’s role and responsibility in the organization. User accounts should be deleted promptly when a user leaves the organization. Likewise, when a user’s role in the organization changes, you may need to reconfigure the user’s access to information to reflect the new responsibilities.
• Encryption – encrypt all information that is being pulled from the information delivery mechanism as an added measure of safety from information pirates.
• Authentication – validate the identity of the user. This requires striking a delicate balance between protecting the information from unauthorized access and making the information easily available to authorized users.

Each of these pillars of business intelligence could be expounded on with ever increasing attention to details. For example, under information delivery, we could discuss portability as more and more workers need to access BI from mobile devices. We could also talk about tips and tricks for speeding up the delivery of information even when complex queries are executed. Under information security we could talk about better ways to protect information from intruders whose methods become more sophisticated as our means of protecting the data evolve, and vice versa.