Part I: Eliminating Uncertainty by Defining the Scope of the Project

Uncertainty about numbers is the source of a lot of arguments in business, government and in your personal life. 

The Big BI industry has tried to address this problem by pointing out the obvious benefits that a data warehouse can bring, that being:

"BI offers you a single version of the truth."

The lack of a single version of the truth manifested itself in my professional life during the 1980's, 90's and the early part of this decade in the following way: 

Typically I would be sitting in a high level management meeting.  This meeting would involve key VP ad Director level staff from finance, operations, sales, quality, and engineering.

Each functional area would talk about "their" numbers and it wasn't unusual for these numbers to be truly theirs and theirs alone.   Someone during  the meeting (usually the accountant) would point out that the figures didn't tie to financial statements.  Arguments ensued over the validity of the figures and time was wasted.

I don't think the erroneous figures were ever the result of people attempting to mislead the audience.  What the manager(s) were trying to do was  present more detailed information than the accountants normally produced becuase that's always how you get to root causes and actionalble plans.

This more granular data is normally not even reviewed by the accounting folks who spend the majority of their time insuring that the financial statements pass muster.  In other words,  the presenter  didn't know what the numbers really should be.

So when I had the opportunity to implement a BI solution for my company I had a few things firmly in mind.  That list included:

1. Defining the scope of what I planned to do.
2. Getting key managers to agree to the scope.
3. Insuring the goals were correct.
4. Holding everyone accountable to keep the scope from creeping beyond the original plan.
5. Insure that the immediate needs would be met by CONSISTENT and ACCURATE FIGURES.
6. Make certain that the data store had the most granular (atomic) data possible.
   

The original scope of my project included five key data areas:

1. Sales
2. Accounts Receivable
3. Accounts Payable
4. Inventory
5. Purchasing

The real endgame was to enable business users to have access to these figures at whatever level of detail they required without the intervention of IT staff or Accountants. 

Your business may have a different set of information needs so my list may not reflect exactly what you need.  That's not a problem, just adapt the list to suit your specific needs.  The key is to define the list specifically.  Interview key managers and line staff to determine what they want to see and remember that will change when you start to give them visualizations of what they originally asked for.

In Part II of this series;  Some Words You Need to Know,  I'll define some of the technical jargon that you need to understand for later parts of this series.