BUSINESS GOALS

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The phrase Focus on what the business is trying to achieve, refers to the overall business, or the part of the business that is engaging us in this project. This means going to the very top of the organization. Historically, it has been common for IT departments to invest in the building of data warehouses on a speculative basis, assuming that once in place the data warehouse will draw business users like bees to a honey pot. While the sentiments are laudable, this build it and they will come approach is generally doomed to fail from the start. The reason is that the warehouse is built around information that the IT department thinks is important, rather than the business.

The main rule is quite simple. If you are hired by the CEO to solve the problem, you have to understand what the CEO is trying to achieve. If you are hired by the marketing director, then you have to find out what drives the marketing director.

It all comes down to business goals. Each senior manager in an organization has goals. They may not always be written down. They may not be well known around the organization and to begin with, even the manager may not be able to articulate them clearly but they do exist. As a data warehouse practitioner, we need some extra soft skills and techniques to help us help our customers to express these soft system problems, and we explore this subject in detail in Chapter 5 when we build the conceptual model.

So what is a business goal? Well it's usually associated with some problem that some executive has to solve. The success or failure on the part of the executive in question may be measured in terms of their ability to solve this problem. Their salary level may depend on their performance in solving this problem, and ultimately their job may depend on it as well. In short, it's the one, two, or three things that sometimes keep them awake at night. (jobwise that is).

How is a business goal defined? Well, it's important to be specific. Some managers will say things like, We need to increase market share or We'd like to increase our gross margin or maybe We have to get customer churn down. These are not bad for a start but they aren't specific enough. Look at this one instead: Our objective is to increase customer loyalty by 1 percent each year for the next five years . This is a real goal from a real company and it's perfect. The properties of a good business goal are that they should be:

Measurable
Time bounded
Customer oriented

This helps us to answer the question of how we'll know we've been successful. The managers will know whether they have been successful if they hit their measured goal targets within the stated time scale. Just a point about number three on the list. It is not an absolute requirement but it is a good check. There is a kind of edict inside of Hewlett Packard and it goes like this: If you aren't doing it for a customer, don't do it! In practice most business goals, in my experience, are customer oriented. Generally, as businesses we want to:

Get more good customers
Keep our better customers
Maybe offload our worst customers
Sell more to customers

People have started to wake up to the fact that the customer is king. It's the customer we have to identify, convince, and ultimately satisfy if we are to be really successful. It's not about products or efficient processes, although these things are important too. Without the customer we might as well stay at home.

Anyway, once we know what a manager's goals are, we can start to talk strategy.

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