Deliverable Resulting from These Activities

Business case assessment report

The business case assessment report should document the following:

- Strategic business goals of the organization

- Objectives of the proposed BI application

- Statement of the business need (business problem or business opportunity)

- Explanation of how the BI application will satisfy that need (proposed BI solution)

- Ramifications of not addressing the business need and not committing to the proposed BI solution

- Cost-benefit analysis results

- Risk assessment

- Recommendations for business process improvements to the operational systems or to the operational business processes and procedures

The assessment report should also have a one- or two-page executive overview that summarizes the details of the report.

Roles Involved in These Activities

Business representative

The business representative is the business person who will directly benefit from the BI application and who will participate as a full-time member on the project core team. He or she should complete the benefits portion of the cost-benefit analysis and should assist the project manager with the risk assessment.
Business sponsor

The business sponsor is the person holding the "purse strings." He or she ensures that proper objectives for the BI application are established and that those objectives support the strategic business goals of the organization. He or she approves the business case assessment and helps set and negotiate the BI project scope to meet the stated BI application objectives.
Data quality analyst

The quality of the source data is always overestimated. In reality, source data quality is much worse than anyone can imagine. The data quality analyst has to be able to estimate the time, effort, and cost associated with finding the dirty data and cleansing it.
Project manager

The project manager should have experience as a systems integrator. The BI decision-support environment requires the management and integration of multiple types of software as well as hardware. In addition, the project manager needs skills in managing the staff, the project, and the expectations of the business community.
Subject matter expert

Expertise in the business is mandatory, and the subject matter expert brings that expertise to the BI project. He or she should also have an understanding of the competition and of the trends in the industry.

Risks of Not Performing Step 1

One of the major risks of not performing this step is that you may end up building a BI decision-support solution that has no strong business driver and does not support a strategic business goal. This can lead to a disappointed business community and an unhappy management group at the end of the project. No matter how valuable the BI application is from an IT perspective, it may not meet the expectations of the business community. If the business people are not content with the information provided to them, they might reject other BI solutions proposed by IT to solve other business problems.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Adelman, Sid, and Larissa Terpeluk Moss. Data Warehouse Project Management . Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Bischoff, Joyce, and Ted Alexander. Data Warehouse: Practical Advice from the Experts . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

DeMarco, Tom. Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency . New York: Broadway Books, 2001.

Devlin, Barry. Data Warehouse: From Architecture to Implementation . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Dych , Jill. e-Data: Turning Data into Information with Data Warehousing . Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2000.

English, Larry P. Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality: Methods for Reducing Costs and Increasing Profits . New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.

Hackney, Douglas. Understanding and Implementing Successful Data Marts . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Inmon, William H., Claudia Imhoff, and Greg Battas. Building the Operational Data Store . New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.

Inmon, William H., Claudia Imhoff, and Ryan Sousa. Corporate Information Factory . New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.

Inmon, William H., John A. Zachman, and Jonathon G. Geiger. Data Stores, Data Warehousing and the Zachman Framework: Managing Enterprise Knowledge . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Jarke, Matthias, Maurizio Lenzerini, Yannis Vassiliou, and Panos Vassiliadis. Fundamentals of Data Warehouses . New York: Springer, 2000.

Kuan-Tsae, Huang, Yang W. Lee, and Richard Y. Wang. Quality Information and Knowledge Management . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.