Last week Brian and I spent some time talking about the value of an enterprise-wide BI strategy. Even though 85% of respondents to our BI benchmark survey in 2011 reported some activity (45% have something in place, the others are working on it), it occurred to us that this might be a good time to explain exactly what we mean by the term, and re-iterate once again why this it’s a good idea.

Let’s start with “why it’s a good idea. ” When correctly executed, an enterprise-wide BI strategy can solve a lot of seemingly intractable problems, get the entire organization “singing from the same hymnal, ” and postpone ripping and replacing core systems for a long time. It can relieve a LOT of pain.

What kind of pain? Here’s a short list of legacy problems that can be solved:

• The merchandising hierarchy we have is incomplete, incompatible with newer systems, or just plain out-of-date. No one wants to undertake a merchandise hierarchy reassignment across all systems. I mean, if we had three or four years to waste, we could probably design the conversion, hire a lot of people, turn our systems on their heads and hope we got it right, or…we could decide what we want the next gen hierarchy(ies) to be and populate them in our enterprise data repository.
• Everyone is operating with different sets of numbers. Face it, we’ve all been there. Numbers in core systems are calculated slightly differently, and each user group brings their own numbers to meetings. What is the single version of truth? What are our inventory, projected receipts, and invoices? What’s our turn? How is each channel really doing?
• Each channel has separate product descriptions and other qualifying information. Of course a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is needed to feed the information to the systems that need it, but what is the single version of product truth? Can we solve that without enterprise-wide BI? Sure, with a lot of brute force and more than a few errors.
• We have multiple versions of customer data truth. Many retailers may send data out to be de-duped by a service bureau, but it would be really nice if that information could be returned and then reside with the products those same customers buy. Targeted marketing is becoming a must. Just because email is “free, ” doesn’t mean the ill-will caused by irrelevant contents doesn’t cost money in the long run.
• We need to measure everyone by the same yardsticks, and satisfy new reporting requirements. As Brian is fond of saying, BI is a very viral tool. Once you put it in, you think of all kinds of other things you’d like to know. The good news is, with today’s simpler interfaces, you don’t need people in the glass house to pull that info for you.

So those are our pain points, but what exactly does creating an enterprise-wide BI strategy actually entail? For that, I’ll quote from our BOOTstrap recommendations in the 2011 BI Benchmark. They’re pretty broad, but a step-wise approach will always serve us well:

The successful enterprise-wide BI strategy will have several critical components:

• Infrastructure: Hardware is now available to support “Big Data “. Build the integration bridges from operational systems directly to the data warehouse.
• Executive Involvement: From the responses we’ve received to our BI survey, we believe Line of Business users are ready and willing to become engaged. They’ll even talk about infrastructure issues, since they recognize the importance of overcoming them.
• A Roadmap: An enterprise-wide BI strategy should include a step-wise approach to adding incremental value with BI and its associated outputs. Think about appropriate hardware platforms, data transformation tools and techniques, and layering in reporting, alerts, and finally advanced analytics that are retail-specific solutions.
• A Wireless Plan for Stores: Even the best insights will lose value if they’re not delivered in a timely fashion to the people that need them in the field. The time is NOW to put a wireless infrastructure in place. Customers can use 3G and 4G to educate themselves. Retailers will need the wireless infrastructure for store managers and employees. Letting customers “hop on the bus ” will just be a plus.
• Modern Delivery vehicles: The days of desktop dashboards and flash reports are drawing to an end. “Consumer grade usability ” has become the order of the day. No one gets a user manual with consumer apps. BI can be equally as simple. Plan for simplicity as an output of back-office complexity.

The task isn’t simple… and it will take some time. But when you’re done, you’ll have the extensible framework you need to go forward in our rapidly changing times. New channels, new types of customers, and more specificity are all expected, but not anticipated. Enterprise-wide BI can help us meet the challenge.

To read the report in full, just click here.