IT's Role in Delivering BI for the Masses

As a IT practitioner delivering enterprise information and analytical solutions inside of Microsoft, I am very impressed by our business intelligence product strategy including the upcoming releases of SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2010.  The opportunity to put BI capabilities in the hands of information workers could not be greater as recently outlined in the InformationWeek article Global CIO: Microsoft Pushes BI For The Masses: 500 Million Prospects -- InformationWeek.

I see the role of IT as both an infrastructure provider as described in the article but also a trusted advisor that serves as a change agent to derive the value of the BI investment across the organization. A powerful self-service BI strategy is not for IT just to provide data to the masses.  The upcoming Microsoft releases set the foundation for a powerful self-service BI strategy when IT assumes the following responsibilities in partnership with the business:

• Act as trusted advisor – IT must have a deep understanding of the business to deliver solutions that are required today and anticipate future needs.  
• Understand personas and self-service scenarios – IT must conduct user centered research to validate the roles, information needs and scenarios that establish the set of data and capabilities that must be delivered.
• Drive an enterprise perspective – IT must drive and facilitate an enterprise perspective to data modeling and integration.  This will ensure IT can deliver on both line of business and enterprise scenarios.
• Enable a collaborative network- the power of information and analytics is when you have a highly connected set of end-users that can share content, insight, and best practices across the organization. IT should enable this community to collaborate using SharePoint 2010 as a foundation and harness the power of the hearts and minds of these change agents across the company.
• Ensure data quality – the delivery of timely, high quality data is required for business users to have confidence using the information for decision making and insight.  IT must integrate data quality processes into the self-service strategy and pro-actively communicate the data quality status and issues to the user base.
• Integrate BI capabilities into business process enabled applications – IT can drive high-levels of adoption by integrating self-service analytical solutions into the familiar applications relied on by users everyday.
• Manage critical, highly standardized BI content -  every organization will have reports and analytical solutions that require formal control and distribution.  IT should focus their expertise on delivering this highly standardized enterprise content and enable self-service for ad-hoc, highly flexible and custom solutions.
• Master data management services – putting the management of business rules and data in the hands of business users is an important element of self service.  IT should integrate the use of SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) into the solutions and enable the agile business to govern this data.
• Services to co-locate IT and business data– IT systems will likely never include all of the data required for information and analytical solutions.  We have started to roll-out a set of capabilities in our EDW platform that enables the business to master and manage business-owned data (e.g. models) on IT servers. This approach reduces data replication and shadow applications, as well as enabling self-service for business users to augment the data and BI solutions.
• Change Management– self-service can thrive when information workers and highly skilled analysts are operating with the sanctioned, single version of the truth data set. IT must facilitate the change processes that migrate users from the shadow solutions under their desk to the secure enterprise solution. PowerPivot for SharePoint provides a great set of capabilities for users to collaborate using enterprise data assets and IT to monitor and manage the infrastructure.