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6 Hot Hints for Business Intelligence Consultants

Are you an IT or development specialist? Then you shall seriously consider Business Intelligence (BI) as your primary focus. It is an opportunity to greatly improve your income and your professional position.

In this post you will see what makes BI so attractive, and learn key directions to switch, evolve and collect valuable results in this field.

Why shall you focus BI?

What makes BI so attractive? Compared with other IT disciplines, BI stands out in some key points:

• Compelling need. Rational management based on quantitative technology is becoming a must for all companies. In order to compete in global market “management by feeling” shall be quickly replaced by “management by numbers” but the number of qualified pros (including managers) is too little for actual demand. This situation will probably last for 5-10 years.

• No outsourcing alternatives. IT requires local presence in order to understand business requirements. No way to outsource to Asia or East Europe.

• No applicable packages. BI is a strategic way to overcome competition. Each case shall focus a specific strategy. In order to differentiate, competitors can possibly use same tools, but hardly same application.

• High value. BI produces information for strategic decision, its value directly reflects on your value! You can adopt pricing strategies that can increase you revenue ten or more times and still let your client extremely satisfied.

No matter if you already are already involved in BI projects or you are a looking for a shift in your consulting career, here are my top 6 suggestions.

1 - Target right market

There are big corporation and there are smaller, dynamic companies. My experience in big corporations is disappointing: lot of discussions and many initiatives but limited results, with the exception of some report to justify the investment they made. I have seen are few exceptions, in technology sector.

Most of those companies recognize results are disappointing, but, instead of finding root causes, invent new names for old technologies (agile BI, self-service BI, real time BI, just to cite a few) to invest more time and resources in the last “state of the art” holy grail.

Targeting those companies is in general loss of time. Long discussions and dispersive meetings end up with the decision to hire some handy supplier to solve their problem using their recently released “state of the art” tool. One more on the shelf, and one more maintenance pain!

Smaller prospects, on the other side are hungry of tangible and immediate results. Their budget is obviously limited, but decision and approval process is usually faster. A prospect get difficult? No problem, jump to next. Universe is large and unexplored: you are targeting the long tail.

2 - Work on information, not data

Information is very different from data. It's not only a matter of naming, as you read in many articles and posts. It's a matter of structure. We use data to produce information, but information is organized in a very different way we are used to store data. Once you realize this you will understand the different techniques used to reduce this gap. This includes multidimensional data (so called cubes), the meaning implication and limitations of usual operations (like drilling down, through...).

I will dedicate a single post to illustrate the difference between information and data and explain how this reflects on certain concepts like dimensions, levels and members that different software suppliers support in different ways.

3 - Take the initiative and rule the process

In general, do not expect managers to define their needs: they usually don't know! BI does not mean “reporting” and using BI for reporting is an overkill. You shall identify information, assess its value and propose, explaining to management what it means and how will improve decision. This is the only way you can produce a valuable BI application.

Ask managers which problem they are facing, but not what information they need. In general they are not enough analytic to respond. Even when they express information need it is usually superficial and does not reflect a cause-effect chain. After first report they will ask for a second then a third … The rest of the story you already know.

Employ a systematic approach to identify information requirements let you get better result in little time.

4 - Pick best approach

There are two main approaches in getting information requirements: through analysis and through analogy.

The analytic approach is usually the best one: you start from a set of problems and goals, then identify a set of business measures and finally capture and transform data to compute those measures. In future posts I will supply practical guidelines about this process, for example how to start and how to refine the list of measures. We have developed those guidelines during years of experience in different application fields, and they are applicable to a wide diversity of cases.

The analogy-driven approach is an alternative when time is very short and you shall demonstrate practical results to a prospect. It is also applicable if you work in a vertical market. You basically adapt a proven business model to work in a similar context. That's another goal of this blog: showing a set of BI applications that are adaptable and partly reusable. You will see several examples in future.

5 - Focus business, not technology

Your primary focus shall be business. Stop looking at new tools and technology and trying to find an application for them! This is the wrong direction. Like making a trip: first decide where to go and then choose best transportation. Look at technology as a mean and not a goal.

In most cases poor BI results were caused are caused by this simplistic strategy: BI was used as an excuse to buy new tools without looking at real business needs.

This is not to say that BI does not require new techniques and software, but there is no tool that you can buy and will do the hard work for you. In addition some simple and techniques and cheap tools are all what you need in 99% of cases.

First of all you will need some math. I know that most IT professionals expertise has been for years restricted to basic arithmetic, but honestly you will need something more to face BI. You surely remember elementary statistics concepts from your college time. Possibly complemented they can do the job. What really matters is to review and apply them on actual cases and only when necessary, to make them less tedious that your college experience. Whenever I introduce math concepts in this blog, I will supply links to related explanation that will refresh your mind with minimum effort.

To manipulate data you can rely on analytic languages that, compared to classic languages, produce results in a fraction of time. There are at least two widely used (and free) analytic languages today: MDX and R. Which one shall you use? It depends! They target different users and application, and that's also the subject of a future post.

6 - Price results, not time

Consulting fees based on time are a common practice, but surely not the best one. If you really want to increase your revenue, you shall base price on perceived value, not on time spent. Perceived value rules any economic activity and consulting shall be no exception. Would that mean that a client would pay more for one hour of your time than another one? Sure! How much more? How much you can rise!

Clients compare price with what they get, not the time you take to produce it. Sure? Well … more or less. They also try to count money in your pocket, but BI consulting is different. While you can possibly infer with reasonable precision the cost of a web page or an input form, BI offers multiple opportunity to make cost undisclosed. What you need are some simple techniques to understand how much your client is disposed to pay. You will see those techniques in next post.

In future posts I will expand on many of the points I have shortly approached and, of course, let me remember you that Component Based Solution partners, can count with all our expertise and orientation (from marketing to technical issues) with absolutely no investment and no risk.

Interested in partnership?

Would like to try or coach this technique with your clients, do you need any additional or technical detail? Please let me know! Component Bases Solutions has great interest in partnership with consultants. We can help you automate your proposed solutions in a very short time. We can also help to increase your visibility through links from many management tools we make freely available on the Web. Please contact for more detail.

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Posted at 04:25PM Jun 21, 2010 by admin in IT  |  Comments[2]