Lelia Morrill and Hemant Warudkar argue that companies today are missing out on the real ROI of business intelligence because we're not thinking strategically about an intelligence infrastructure that extends across the value chain. I'm an avid fan of articles such as this one which present a lucid "big picture" of a current business technology challenge -- and actually offer practical solutions.
Many companies have tried using data warehouses with BI applications to deliver valuable information to users, but translating business needs properly can be a complicated undertaking with a delayed return.
So, how can a company monitor the activity across its supply/value chain and coordinate core functions using information to optimize business processes, with very little impact to its current environment? The answer is the BI network infrastructure (BINI), which enables information sharing, exchange, and movement, passing intelligence between core functions so that the business can be monitored across the enterprise. A BINI isn't about ERP-level integration, data warehouse organization, historical or multidimensional analysis, online analytic processing (OLAP), or predictive modeling. Rather, a successful BINI project focuses on the infrastructure and enterprise processes necessary to integrate and unite information and analytic models from any type of system, whether operational or decision support.
In change management, it is often difficult to get a high level perspective of how processes in the new business environment will interact with people and processes in the existing environment. On an IT process reengineering project, I am using a valuable software tool authored by Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT called Matrix of Change. It is particularly useful in feasibility, sequence of execution, pace and determining net value added of the change. Best of all, it's free.
The advantage of the transition matrix is that it shows the interactions involved in moving from existing practices to a clean slate. Simply starting with a clean slate tells a team nothing about the difficulty of a transition (Harrison and Loch) while using a "blank sheet of paper" for design can implicitly assumes a "blank check" is available to cover implementation costs (Davenport and Stoddard). The transition matrix can show how important interactions between proposed changes may play out. A subset of the transition matrix may be opposing between the existing and target processes. This may indicate that it is best to phase out the old completely before beginning the new. If a there exists a large amount of competing practices it may be best to start fresh in a green field site.
The transition matrix, emerging from the combination between the horizontal and the vertical matrices, helps determine the degree of difficulty in shifting from the current state to the future state. The percentage of positive and negative signs in the transition matrix indicates how disruptive the change process will be. A transition matrix with a comparatively large number of complementary practices and few conflicting practices indicates that the change will be relatively incremental and non-disruptive. In the case of UPS the transition matrix is very complementary indicating that the transition contains many complementary practices.
For the ambitious and academically minded among us, Brynjolfsson has published a paper on using the matrix.
