Technologies are normally considered cost centers for businesses. Business intelligence breaks that mold as it is the one technology that can generate measurable profit for the organization. It only takes one significant insight to increase the profit margin instantly turning your BI program into a profit center. With that said, BI is one of the more expensive technologies to implement. Let’s discuss the economics of business intelligence to properly set expectations with your business.

A business intelligence program begins with people. You will need to start with at least one architect and one or more developers. The developers will function in the following roles:

• engineers to acquisition the source data

• modelers to produce self-service dimensional models

• visualizers to create reports and interactive visuals

• data scientists to perform predictive and prescriptive analysis

It will take some time to assemble a full team, especially with the market the way it is now. There is a shortage of available, good BI professionals. Also, just hiring people does not constitute setting up a team. The team will have to determine its own process to produce consistent BI solutions which will take a substantial amount of time. Your team should never just “start doing” when setting up a BI program. Process is paramount. It will realistically take your organization a minimum of six months to build a team and to get the basics in place to generate your first insight-producing report.  This translates to a significant cost in wages without any corresponding results. As a business you must accept this cost in time and money – it is the only way to get to an insight that can transfigure all BI costs to profit. ConradBI can shorten the time to two to three months by guiding your new team through a proven process that works from day one. We can assist in people selection and mature your BI program at a much faster rate lowering your cost. We have done this before and know how to overcome the various challenges in team development.

Selecting the right technology can be a challenging task. There are many tools to select from in the various developer disciplines – and they do not always integrate well. It will take time to select and learn the tools and properly configure them to support the process your team develops. It is important that you automate where possible so that you can replicate consistent results. Because these tools may touch proprietary business data your legal team may need to review the vendor’s NDA and/or license agreement – this can take time. All said and done, you are looking at six to nine months for tool implementation assuming your team can develop its process in parallel. A custom solution built in house will take even longer – sometimes years – and runs the risk of never reaching its full potential. Your business and BI team will have to determine which tool path to take. Although tools can be expensive to buy or develop, your main cost in tool implementation is effort. You will have to pay your BI team to use the tools for a significant amount of time to set up a full BI platform. These costs add up quickly and can be substantial. Or…you could just leverage our technologies. ConradBI consultants use a custom toolset specifically designed to implement the various needed technologies quickly – and it fully supports our proven process.

There is a hidden cost that businesses often overlook – the cost of engineering and modeling the data. There seems to be a common misunderstanding that most business intelligence work is done by building interactive reports. This is not true. Engineering and modeling are 80% of the work while building visuals is only 20%. When organizations set up their BI program incorrectly, they end up reprocessing data repeatedly. This is an often hidden cost – and it can be expensive. It is important that you build a process and program that makes your modeled data reusable. You should rely heavily on conformed dimensions so that you are not recreating filters and methods of aggregation each time – this also opens the door to cross process analysis. You should also future proof your fact tables by including as many metrics as possible even if the current business request does not ask for them. A touch-it-take-it mentality saves over the long run. The cost of data acquisition and modeling will only have to be paid once when a good process is in place.  The ConradBI process and toolset does exactly that!

To implement a BI program, you will have people costs, technology costs, and data acquisition and modeling costs. If your BI program is set up correctly, your team should be able to find business savings that will turn your BI program into a profit center. ConradBI can help make this happen at a much faster rate and lower cost.  Contact us today to get started.