How does and LEA choose which BI projects to begin?

The purpose of this article is to give propsective clients a sense direction needed when building their Business Intelligence solution.  By creating an understanding about how a BI solution matures, clients may best choose which area(s) to focus on when building a solution.

I am often curious as to why my clients choose the all-or-nothing approach to business intelligence.   I suppose this is because of the so called end-to-end BI solutions being offered by the major vendors, or it could be the lure of the features offered only flagship editions.   The truth is, your organization likely has a good starting point already; Business Intelligence represents an evolution in understanding your business by interpreting the information collected.   This makes the maturity of the solution dependant on your organizations ability to correctly interpret and apply the information.    For BI solutions to provide value, your project goals must align themselves with an organizations strategy, maturity, and overall desire to become more efficient, productive and successful.   However, with BI, it’s equally important to predict change and to keep pace with your organization’s strategy and maturity this means solutions must be capable to meet these demands.  These principals can generally be applied in almost any industry, In this article we will focus our attention on Local Education Agencies (LEA) so they may best choose the right direction in applying BI technology.  

Fundamentally the concepts of BI must relate to the maturity of your organization.  For starters, BI is nothing without “raw” data that is fed into a variety of systems. Most LEAs have a number of operational systems where users perform data-entry, collections of raw data from external sources, and even data warehouses.   Pulling these systems together in a consistent way and translating data into a common language is the first step in the BI process and is called Integration.  I prefer the term translation since the goal of BI is to translate the data into terms each user can understand.    Often, your organization will have many types of users each looking at the data differently; this of course, requires the data to be presented using different terms.   To even begin down the road of Business Intelligence, LEAs must first find ways to integrate information from your internal systems such as student information systems, financial systems and other data warehouses; in addition the LEA must also find ways to integrate data from external systems such as standardized test scores, classroom benchmarks, career and workforce information.  

The next logical step for the LEA is building Reporting system.  Reporting alone, serves as basic business intelligence as it provides a delivery mechanism for information to be interpreted easily by the end-user. Subscribers of the reports, at first, will typically be decision makers such as school officials, councilors and district administration staff. However, as the needs grow for the information even teachers, parents and students may be subscribers of reports.  Reports can be static (published) or dynamic (ad-hoc) which help present information that has been pulled from your information systems.   Used correctly reporting can be a valuable tool in areas such as school improvement planning (SIP) and in presenting and integrated view on any student’s records (ePortfolios). 

Applying Data Analysis in Business Intelligence represents a significant leap in both the maturity of your organization and in the complexity of the software required for the solution.   Complexities arise from the amount of information and how it’s presented in terms each user understands.  It is important that information is provided to the system at the lowest level since you may want to use analytic features to adhocly aggregate and drill-down into data from any number of dimensions.   LEAs may also rely on analytics to help track progress on programs and services, in addition to comparing information from similar students, schools and even other districts.

Another area of BI, tied closely to analytics, is Performance Measurement.  What I’m referring to here, is the opportunity for the LEA and it’s staff to create and track improvement strategies at any level.   By providing the ability to manage key performance indicators, the system will allow you to keep track of quality and performance measures that apply to your students, your schools, your district and even the state.  Measures required by these indicators may also be driven strategic directions set by the LEA or even the State (such as NCLB measures); hence, performance measurement represents yet another step in the maturity of the solution and the LEA.  

The last, and one of the most beneficial steps in the maturity model for BI, is Workflow Management.  Workflow (Process) management integrated with the BI solution represents a complete end-to-end efficient solution where information retrieved from the solution is acted upon and fed back into the system creating a continuous improvement cycle.    Workflow provides the vehicle for acting upon problems and opportunities discovered by the system.  For example, the system may have information somewhere that shows there are 10 teachers that are not performing as well compared to others in the district.  A BI solution with workflow capability could alert the principals at each of the teacher’s schools to inform them of this achievement gap and recommend which teachers in the district could best provide in-service to help reduce the gap.   

Weather your interested in a solution than is a simple resource to all staff, or a complex tool to help automatically distribute information to and alert those who need it.   Business Intelligence can provide value at any stage of maturity.    My suggestion to you is to start small, establish a direction, and take frequent steps to introduce projects that align with your organizations strategy.    And, be careful not to place too much focus in one area for too long or your solution may loose value and support by your stakeholders!