I don’t want to be a BA!!!!!!!!!!!-----3

By the time the data was received it was more than 2 hours.
Further analysis & presentation of the data was delayed.
The decision taking time was increased & a client meeting was impacted.
Loss to the business was intangible.

This is a very small example of Cross functional BI delivery system failure or lack of coordination between the components of the BI delivery system.

On a larger scale I had another friend of mine who told me a similar experience in the marketing domain were the BI team had forecasted & confirmed some turbulence in a given area but since the same wasn’t cascaded enough to the field executives a huge amount of financial loss was suffered. These are just some of the examples that I have seen but I’m sure there a million of such instances in almost all the sectors were the BI team is not well established or matured. Even in the case of the BI team being matured the corporate system wouldn’t simply integrate with the input & output part of the BI teams. This is the root cause for the failure of most of the BA projects around the world. However there are other reasons like lack of skill sets, wrong tests carried out for decision making, wrong data considered, no correct data available various other reasons.


One of my friend said “We need to have good modelers, analysts, marketers, business managers etc. And I think, that is what any Analytics Team should be made of…”
I would tweak this to say A BI teams Critical Components (In terms of skill sets) are

Data Collection, warehousing & storage Analysts.
Data storage, manipulation, archiving Analysts.
Data mart, ETL, Reporting etc Analysts.
Query Optimization, emergency response Decision support analyst.
Statistical analysis specialists, Business analyst

I’m sure you will strongly agree that every business is highly & constantly changing itself & adapting to the highly competitive global market. Not only this but every company need to sustain its growth, withstand market forces, withstand & survive economic, financial & various other storms. Also given that most of the sectors are getting saturated, it’s very important for every company to apply new dimensions, drive innovation & plunge deep into Blue waters.


All the above compelling factors drive needs/questions at various levels of a company that are critical to its success


Thus the BI needs to help the business make tactical decisions, modify, tune or realign business strategies & processes to gain competitive advantage or in countering any inevitable market forces that could tamper the business goals. Most importantly thousands of questions arising at various levels of business are to be answered most consistently, accurately, coherent to the business language and of course “I need the report before you take your next breathe”
The process of supporting decision making is iterative in nature & is generally catered by the ad-hoc reports, scorecards, etc which needs hands on approach, thanks to BI tools which have become more friendlier. May it be SAS, Cognos, Business objects etc all of them try to cater in user friendly authoring of reports, execute queries, and perform analysis and various other visualizations. So it’s a fairly easy job to handle huge volumes of data now than ever before. But this is just not what BI is expected of.

Any company that knows its customers & business is already well aware of many important high pay off patterns that its employees have observed over the years.
What a BA & data mining should also and can do is confirm such empirical observations & find new subtle & dynamically changing patterns that could yield steady & incremental improvements in line with the business strategy & goals (Plus the occasional breakthrough / insight)

The critical cross functional flow pattern every BI team’s should have according to me is something like the following.

(Before I talk about the long chart here is a Kit Kat break)

Plight of Business & BI team

I need this, I need that, and it should be this but not that….
It should only focus on this with positive impact……
Tell me who is first; tell me who is best….
I need this, I need that…………
I need it before I die…………..

What will happen there….. If I do this here,
Where will the impact be? If that was done
What will happen if it’s not done?
I need this, I need that…………
I need it before you take the next breathe…

Sir I don’t understand, Madam you aren’t listening,
We can’t get this done, server is not happening,
This is down & that is down,
He is on off & she is laid off ;)
I need this, I need that…………

OOPs & loops I went bananas….
What the fuck I’m stuck……..
This formula wouldn’t work with this data!!!!!!!!!!
Oh no it’s this ways... ok I gotcha!!!!!!!!!
We got it sir, we’ve done it….


Oh your great….this is great…..
But can you simply tell what our fate……is…
I don’t know what regression…..is
I’m only concerned with what our profit progression …….. Is
I need this, I need that…………
I need it before we die…………..

A typical conversation when a BU manager asks a report when sometimes we can make no sense of what they say….. (Yogesh this is for you, remember Jonathan Coplin Beau).
Sometimes we get stuck in puzzles that seem to be the greatest mystery for even Microsoft’s development team, at the end we realize it was just a simple thing all was needed was different eye. We send high info reports with all the statistical or other jargons when the BU manger goes bonkers while he doesn’t make any sense out of it…even if he does he still has questions….. So on & so forth………..