The TDWI BI Maturity Model

As most industry experts tout the ongoing nature of Business Intelligence projects, there comes a natural desire to rate the status quo BI in an organization. However, as wide and diverse a Business Intelligence implementation is in terms of the tools, processes, people and culture invovled, it does need an overall benchmarking to assess future directions by setting goals and understanding the shortcomings of current offerings. To measure the ‘Maturity’ of an implementation, several independent organizations and certain vendors have developed their own assessment models. Among such publicly available models, the TDWI’s BI Maturity Model is a top down, vision oriented model which organizations can use to develop a road map. The model is a generalization of multiple BI projects and implementations indicating certain patterns of behavior based on five different aspects:

1. The BI Adoption

2. Organization Control and Processes

3. Usage

4. Insight

5. ROI

Such a maturity assessment is important in terms of gauging the value of the business intelligence inititave. For systems integrators and consultants its serves as a guide to set project milestones, deliverables and management and for C-Level execs to understand a step by step guide to the ROI from BI investments.

The TDWI BI Maturity Model offers a framework to adjudge the current standings of a BI implementation in terms of its adoption, control, usage, insights and finally the ROI.

An associated poster is presented here taken from Timo Elliott’s blog:

Each graph has its own target audience within the stakeholders and serves as a guide to a particular agenda. The management might be more interested in the last graph, the business value and ROI, whereas the business analysts might be more interested in the Insight whil the program implementers will focus on the adoption and usage as their primary concerns.

The Gaps:

While advocating the value of Business Intelligence, it is imperative for organizations to understand the gaps which obstruct their progress, either caused by the management or by the prevailing culture of the organization. It is the crossing of these gaps that defines the change management agenda for the program.

In the BI adoption cycle, the gaps define the points of stagnation which requires consultancy and a self motivated drive by the organization to cross it. But in other cycles the gaps indicate paradigm shift, state transition and time to reap the rewards of the investment. For the Local control vs enterprise standards, this indicates a well placed Business Process Management occasionally coupled by Data Governance initiatives which take over adhoc factors within organizations. In the first gap called the gulf, it is the individuals who feel empowered mostly by self-service BI capabilities but it kind of stops at that until and unless the organization throttles to move towards the second gap, called the chasm where it finds a mutual agreement between the individual entities of control and the corporate governance and management practices which leads to organization enlightenment, becoming a ’sage’.

For the BI Usage, before the gulf, the organization is equipped with its first batch of power users which identifies freedom from their IT department to provide insight. But here is where the gap occurs. A group of established power users indirectly in control of the BI program lets the organization stagnate and miss out the ability to truly empower all their business users and not just power users. Although an ideal utopian state to accomplish, but it has been the approach of wise men, there is no end to gaining wisdom and becoming a sage. To overcome this chasm, organizations further enhance their incentive systems for business users while providing the next layer of BI services: the customization capabilities to supplement self-service. Here tools become pervasive to the organization staff and their throughput increases.

For BI Insight, the phases between chasms indicates the shortening of the decision making process. Once the second and final chasm is crossed, organizations gain the capability of automated decsison making and a system which supplements business users with true decision support.

Programs such as BI require a dedicated sponsorship from the management to prosper and when they do take interest, expectations of ROI might supersede their actual values. This is partly caused by phenomena well explained in Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

This poster aids the BI teams to better explain the ROI expectations to the management in charge of the programs. What you sow, so shall you reap system applies to BI programs as well.

The model is well explained by the author Wayne Eckerson and certain blogs supplement the material as well.

Some notable links:

1. TDWI BI Maturity Assessment Tool

2. You can’t get there from here!

3. Hows your BI Maturity

Gartner 2009 Strategic Technologies

Although a slightly old post, but here is an interesting article by Gartner on the 2009 Stratgic Technologies. A motivation to relook at this Oct, 2008 vision a quarter later reveals the accuracy of the vision.

2009 began with a downturn economy and sales strategy focusing on fixing things, a rather reactive approach but in the world of information technology, things are getting better. Lots of convergence, huge strides in maturity, increase in motivation and an aggressive roadmap.

Gartner presents the top 10 Strategic Technologies enlisted here:

Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Beyond Blade Servers
Green IT
Web Oriented Architectures
Enterprsie Mashups 2.0
Specialised Systems
Social Software and Social Networking
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence

My understanding of the list actually streams Gartner’s choices into three:

Infrastructure
NextGen Applications
Business Intelligence

Infrasructure:
Virtualization is a massive stride forward in server consoildation and to an extent lowering licensing costs of software for organisations. As the usage of virtualization increases within companies, the need for virtualization management and security has increased. Enterprises already at a mature state of virtualization will further focus on collaboration of their virtual platforms with existing physical infrastrcture, more invisibility of virtualization on networks and capabiliites to take snapshots for cloning physical servers arrangements and configurations including software.
Pain points for the year will be virtualization security as the need for bringing virtualization into mainstream environments will reveal aspects of security specific to this line of technology.

Cloud Computing will further SaaS models and the business model’s appeal will increase in emerging markets like the Middle East and the Far East. This is coupled by the reason of increased investments in telecommunication backbones and greater awareness of outsourcing IT maintaince to service providers offering services on the cloud.
However, there are many pain points ranging from raising costs of telecom and sporadic skepticm in TCO of the SaaS business model in markets like the Middle East. Pain points remain the height of exceeding expacations and lack of best practices to adopt for most organizations.

Green IT and Blade dissappearance can be duly served by the changing trends in the software consupmtion behavior from products to services) where service providers determine these initiatives. However, Green IT  will not be adopted widely during this continued recession phase.

Next Gen Apps:
SOA is reaching its plateau of productivity on the Gartner’s Hype Cycle and will further enterprise mashups. This technology has already given a direction to evolve web standards and architectures influenced a wider range of application connectivity leading to benefits harnessed by other technologies and applications including social networking applications, collaboration and business intelligence. However, with the emerging trends of converged networks, pervasive computing applications including location aware, embedded systems will increase as well. Companies already having a level of this will continue to invest in application semantics using BPM automation, service orchestrations and semantic web services. Certain vendors have already started to bring forward their product offerings in these areas.

Business Intelligence:
It is prime time for BI to flourish, already aggressively growing in 2007 and 2008 according to both Gartner and TDWI, BI makes its justifaction for greater compliance, visibility, transparency, something whcih the post-recession period demands. This period also serves the motivation for organsiations to focus on their performance management. Business Intelligence offerings has a wider portfolio to offer this year with many vendors offering (or acquiring) data management appliances including Teradata, Greenplum, Microsoft etc. Last year vendor consolidation has brought greater strength to individual portfolio of each BI provider. SaaS models are also avaiable as alternatives giving customers much flexibility and even possiblity to mature their BI initiatives. Costs of implmementing Business Intelligence will go down for organisations with experience in consuming SaaS and those ready to invest in open source BI which has reached impressive maturity.
However, Predictive Analytics is still to go mainstream this year but is a probable reality in coming years.