MI0036 Business Intelligence Tools

Explain business development life cycle in detail ?

Each of the phases in the above life cycle is described below.

Project Planning Developing a project plan involves identification of all the tasks necessary to implement the BI project. The Project Manager identifies the key team members, assigns the tasks, and develops the effort estimates for their tasks. There is much interplay between this activity and the activity of defining the Business Requirements and aligning the BI system/data warehouse system with the business requirements is very crucial. Therefore you need to understand the business requirements properly before proceeding further.

Project Management This is the phase wherein the actual implementation of the project takes place. The first step here is to define the business requirements and the implementation is carried out in three phases on the basis of the requirements. The first phase (includes technical architecture design, selection and installation of a product) deals with technology, the second phase (includes Dimensional Modeling, Physical Design, ETL Design & Development) focuses on data and the last phase (includes BI Application Specification, BI Application Development) deals with design and development of analytical applications. The steps in these phases are discussed below.

1 Defining the Business Requirements Business requirements are the bedrock of the BI system and so the Business Requirements Definition acts as the foundation of the Lifecycle methodology. The business requirements defined at this stage provide the necessary guidance to make the decisions. This process mainly includes the following activities:

Requirements planning Collecting the business requirements Post-collection documentation and follow-up

2 Technical Architecture Design

Creation of the Technical Architecture includes the following steps: 1. Establishing an Architecture task-force 2. Collecting Architecture-related requirements 3. Documenting the Architecture requirements 4. Developing a high-level Architectural model 5. Designing and specifying the subsystems 6. Determining Architecture implementation phases 7. Documenting the technical Architecture 8. Reviewing and finalizing the Architecture

3 Selection and Installation of a Product The selection and the installation of a business intelligence product is carried out in the following steps: 1. Understanding the corporate purchasing process 2. Developing a product evaluation matrix 3. Conducting market research 4. Shortlisting the options and performing detailed evaluations 5. Conducting a prototype (if necessary) 6. Selecting a product, installing on trial, and negotiating the value/price.

4 Dimensional Modeling A dimensional model packages the data in a symmetric format whose design goals are obtaining the user know-how, query performance, and resilience to change. In this step, a data-modeling team is formed and design workshops are conducted to create the dimensional model. Once the modeling team is confident of the model prepared, the model is demonstrated and validated with a broader audience and then documented.

5 Physical Design In this step, the dimensional model created in the previous step is translated into a physical design. The physical model includes the details viz., physical database, data types, key declarations, permissibility of nulls. 6 ETL Design & Development ETL stands for Extraction, Transformation, and Loading. ETL tools are used to extract the data from the operational data sources and to load the same into a data warehouse.

7 BI Application Specification In this step, a set of analytical applications are identified for building a BI system based on the business requirements definition, type of data being used, and the architecture of the warehouse proposed. 8 BI Application Development This is step wherein a specific application (tool) is selected from the identified applications for actual implementation of the BI system. 9 Deployment This is the step wherein the technology, data and analytical application tracks are converged. The completion of this step can be assumed as the completion of actual building of the BI system. 10 Maintenance & Growth During this step, the project team provides the user-support to the end-users of the system. Also, the team involves in providing the technical support required for the system so as ensure the continuous utilization of the system. This step may also include making some minor enhancements to the BI system. Revising the Project Planning As the project makes progress, the project manager of the project has to revise the project plan to accommodate the new business interests, concerns raised by the end-users.