A BI Audit quantifies the current BI state and identifies ways to improve it

BI Audit (BI Healthcheck)

In today’s fast-paced business environment, it is rare to find an organisation without some form of Business Intelligence (BI) and/or Data Warehouse (DW) infrastructure, be it simple operational reporting on the one hand, or sophisticated Dashboards or Data Mining on the other. Many of these BI implementations have evolved according to rapidly growing needs, and as a result, are often fragmented and/or misaligned to business requirements, some battling to keep up with the increasing demands for BI in the business. But how do you go about reaching the next level of BI in your organisation, and where do you even start?

To assist companies in developing an effective future strategy for BI, and to assess the ability of their current environments to deliver on the business’s needs, InfoBlueprint has designed a helpful service – the BI Audit.

Put simply, the objectives of a BI Audit are to provide answers and recommendations to address the following questions

Are best practices consistently being applied to the design, development and management of your BI implementations and environment?
Are your BI processes and systems fully aligned to the current and future business requirements?
What is the gap between “what is” and “what should be” in order to ensure an optimal BI system, and to move the organisation to the next levels of BI?
What resources, effort, processes and tools are required to deliver?

The time required to undertake a BI Audit depends on the size and complexity of the organisation and its BI activities. An approximate duration can be supplied following an initial scoping meeting. A BI Audit primarily involves a series of interviews and/or workshops with relevant stakeholders, as well as a review of available documentation, reports, sample data, data models, physical schemas, and sample code.

The areas covered are as follows:

Alignment between Business Goals and Business Intelligence – current and future

BI Architecture, addressing the following sub-areas:
- Data location and data flows: source, staged, warehoused, presented
- Data quality (IT aspects)
- Information quality (Business User aspects)
- ETL processes
- Data models, data schemas
- Timing and scheduling
- Presentation, querying, reporting and analysis
- Metadata management

BI-related Technology platforms and tools

BI processes:
- Analysis, design, development, production
- Change management
- Maintenance

People and skills

The deliverables of the BI Audit are:

The BI Audit Report containing:
- Review of current BI processes and practices,
- SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)
- Recommendations for short-term and long-term improvement,

A presentation to all customer stakeholders of the above, including the recommended action plan

The primary value of this service is that it will allow your organisation to:

Establish your current position of BI maturity against industry best practices;
Update the documentation on your current BI systems, processes, environment and practices to enable you to proceed to the next levels on a basis of fact;
Understand the investment and effort required to proceed;
Facilitate the development of a plan or “roadmap” for BI evolution

Finally, due to potential sensitivities, experience has shown that having this exercise conducted by an independent third party such as InfoBlueprint, eases the introduction of potential change and facilitates buy-in by all stakeholders.