Planning for business intelligence adoption - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 37

In this section, we provide an overview of the characteristics of each stage of the BI Maturity
Model and describe the tools that are useful in each stage.
Stage 0: Prenatal
In the prenatal stage, a company has yet to create a data warehouse to support information require-
ments. Instead, all reports are sourced from operational systems, with no consolidation of informa-
tion across systems without special processes in place. That is, there are no formal Extract, Transform,
and Load (ETL) processes. Financial applications often have the richest set of reports available in the
company and are the primary source for management reports. At this point, the available reports
are static, and focus on historical events to help users understand what has happened. Any changes
desired by users require customization by IT, although it's not uncommon for such requests to take
weeks or months to fulfill.
To transition from the rigid reporting system typical of this stage to a formal BI solution, many
companies start by reproducing their existing reports in Reporting Services. Problems associated with
responding to requests for customization don't go away by taking this approach. However, with some
forethought, with parameterization of reports, users can make changes to the report content, which
in some cases might forestall the need for one-off report development.
Stage 1: Infant
When users can't get what they need from the operational reports, they often develop their own
solutions, which leads to a proliferation of reports based on Excel spreadsheets or Access databases
that users have cobbled together. Such user-developed data collections are also described as spread-
marts , shadow systems , or skunkworks projects.
Executives often enlist analysts to compile brieing topics based on these informal data collections.
The focus begins to shift from trying to understand what has happened in the past to attempting to
understand how past results might influence what happens in the future.
What starts as a compilation of official data for a specific need can grow into a mission-critical
solution that people come to rely on, yet it's unmanaged, unsecured, undocumented, fragile, and
cannot be audited. It can take a lot of manual labor to gather and manipulate the data, leaving little
time to analyze the data collected before a decision from the user is required. The concern of each
user in this stage is to produce information that supports personal decision-making. Little regard
is given to reconciling results with other users producing comparable information, and no official
system-of-record exists to resolve results that disagree.
In this stage, Excel and Access are popular tools. For organizations that have yet to implement a
formal BI environment, an Excel data model or PowerPivot in Excel can simplify the effort of gather-
ing and integrating data. But, it doesn't solve the more serious problem resulting from a lack of IT
oversight.