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Creating a responsive BI service

We're looking at how we can create a reporting and analytics service that can respond quickly to new requests for information.  The motivation for this is that business intelligence requirements change quickly; managers and data analysts frequently come up with questions for which they require access to new data in order to answer.

Many organisations have a dedicated BI team who can concentrate on the needs of their data analysts and other users. The most effective BI teams - by which I mean those teams who provide the most useful information to the people who need it - are multi-disciplinary teams that include business users, data analysts, data architects, and ETL developers.

Unfortunately, our current structure hinders this integrated approach.  We don't have the resources to dedicate a team to each of our services, because we run over 100 application services.  Instead, we have development teams and a support team, and a planning process that lets us assign staff effort to the most valuable or essential projects that arise each year.  It's efficient in terms of optimising effort for outcomes, but it is not an agile system.

Much of the IT industry is moving to a DevOps model, in which development and operations are combined.  That approach is usually found in organisations that develop a small number of products and so can afford to dedicate teams to specific services.  It would be a challenge for us to adopt this operating model across the board, but we think we can take some steps in this direction for the particular case of the BI service.

As a first step, we may create a virtual team, with the team members having a defined amount of their working week assigned to the BI service.  With this dedicated resource, we would put a process in place to receive and prioritise requests, working with senior management to set overall priorities.  This should enable us to respond to request from our BI users considerably quicker than our current processes. 

We are still at the early stages of setting up this service and many details will be need to be resolved before it is up and running.  There are no guarantees that we will be able to create this service within the constraints of the wider organisation, but I am optimistic that we can make this work.



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