What is Your BI Strategy?

 I recently had the pleasure of presenting a paper on “How to Create a Business Intelligence Strategy” at the SAS Global Forum in Orlando. I started off by asking for a show of hands if the organisation the audience worked at had a current existing BI strategy. Out of approx 150 people only 20% put up their hands. I then followed this up with a further question: “Keep your hands up if your BI strategy is documented and accessible so that all information consumers at the organisation know what the strategy is.” Three hands remained. 

Check the Roadmap!

Anyone who has kids knows the heart crunching moment when you’ve just started on a long journey and they say “Are we there yet?”. I always say “Check the map!” How do you know if you’ve reached the destination of your BI provision if you don’t have a map, a documented and communicated strategy for providing all your Business intelligence requirements. In our work with clients we’ve identified 5 areas of Business Intelligence Strategy which we recommend corporations and SMEs alike design, document and distribute.

Your BI Strategy Roadmap

This outlines the scope of what is covered by the BI strategy. It should align to the overall corporate strategy and leave a tangible deliverable which can be communicated to the rest of the organisation, so they know the most effective method of BI provision.

Stakeholder Management

This is all about asking the right questions of the right people; identifying the impact and influence of the current reporting systems and identifying the up and coming challenges the organisation faces. Crucially the subject matter areas need to be identified as a high level approach to organising BI.

Architectural Blueprint 

This defines who governs data and reporting information. There is no “one size fits all” approach to providing Business Intelligence. Some organisations create a Business Intelligence Competency Centre, others have teams of MI analysts, others have even less structure – depending on the size and culture of the organisation. The question of development methodology and reporting lineage should also be addressed here.

Capability Improvement

Provides the stepping stones to move from “the now” to “the future”. Are the resources you have skilled up? Do business processes need addressing, as often much legacy reporting has built up due to inconsistencies in processes?Investigation should also be made into the current hardware and software capability to ensure they’re fit for purpose.

Implementation Planning 

Finally the implementation of the strategy should highlight timescales, costs and resources to enable the board to determine the size of the implementation project. 

Creating a Business Intelligence strategy shouldn’t be an arduous exercise as long as everyone is on board with the concept of providing accurate and timely data in the most efficient method possible. The implementation of the strategy can vary depending on the size of organisation and the cultural appetite for change. 

There is also an argument that once a strategy, any strategy, is created then it’s already out of date, due to constant changes in the organisation, the market or the world. This is all the more reason to document and communicate the strategy, so that if things do change you can update the strategy to reflect the latest situation.

More Information

Surely an undocumented strategy is no strategy at all. Further insight into our streamlined BI approach can be found on our website Achieve Intelligence (www.achieveintelligence.com). Our monthly newsletter also captures thought-leading articles in the data and BI arena. Receive a free subscription at any time by selecting the following link:  http://eepurl.com/hJXQY

Blog Post Author

Guy Garrett is a freelance contractor and managing director of the Achieve Intelligence network a group of business intelligence  professionals who provide added value to their customers by  providing niche services in the BI arena. With over 20 years SAS experience Guy is able to talk in technical detail as well as operate at the strategic level. Learn more about how Achieve Intelligence transformed a monthly 150-page document into a business intelligence dashboard that helps the customer find the golden nuggets of information.

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SAS stored processes are similar to SAS programs in that they use the same programming language.  Many of my SAS programs I created early on were only used by me, so I could live with  a little uncertainty and it was easy enough to check the logs for any issues.  If anything went wrong then I knew what I had to change.

Stored processes required a whole new level of thinking – my first few stored processes back in the SAS 9.1.3 days were – well they left a lot to be desired.  When I would roll out a new stored process I would often get a call from a user who had done something crazy and the stored process wouldn’t work.  For instance, why would anyone put a state name in a customer name field to see if it would return all the customers from that state?  Only one thing could happen – no report!  

Here’s some usability tricks that I have learned with my SAS Stored Processes to make them more robust and harder to break.  Really the out-of-the box prompts provide a lot of functionality that really helps. That’s right – let’s build a better mousetrap!

Tip #1: Require an Answer for Your Prompt

If your SAS stored process code will break unless it gets a value from the prompt, require the user to have a value.  For example if your code is something like the following example, your stored process will fail if the user does not make a selection:

proc print data=OPS.orders;
where status = “&StatusPrompt”;
run;

One way around this situation is to require an answer. When you create the stored process, select the Requires a non-blank value check box on the General pane.  With this selection, SAS will not let the user move forward without an answer. SAS adds an asterisk to the prompt and if the user selects Run without providing an answer, an error message is generated. Very nice built-in functionality.  It will save you hours of coding.

Tip #2: Provide a Default Value

Tip #1 can be annoying and you might want to make sure the prompt situation warrants it.  As an alternative you can also set a default value for the prompt. Based on the prompt type, there are many ways to indicate the value.  This does allow a user to just go with the defaults so the stored process does not generate an error message.  The only downside I see is if the user doesn’t understand they can make changes – but most people are computer-savvy enough that they can understand it.

Hint: Set the default value when testing your stored process so you don’t have to fill out the values each time.

Tip #3:  Provide Minimum and Maximum Prompt Values

If you know the data starts at and ends in a certain time frame, then don’t allow the user to select past those values.  Check the SAS Stored Process: How do I use a Date Range Prompt? for an example of setting minimum and maximum date values. 

Here’s some examples to give you some other ideas. For numeric prompts, if you know the user cannot select a value greater than 100, then limit the value to 100.  Likewise, if you are allowing the user to type a value, then set the minimum value to 5.  It is more likely to be a word.  You have to decide based on your data – but I hope this example just gives you some ideas of how to use the prompts built-in error-checking.

These built-in error checks from SAS will save you a lot of coding – so use them to make your stored process more robust and usable.  But mainly to prevent users calling you to report what your stored process does not do.

Learn More about SAS Stored Processes and Prompts

You can learn more tips and tricks for creating, debugging, and using SAS stored processes in the 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes book. It's a complete guide to SAS stored processes! Download a sample chapter or view the table of contents.

Tip – Click on any picture to see a larger image!

Use a “Known Good” First Time

If you are trying this process for the first time, use a “known good” or simple spreadsheet so if any issues arise you can at least eliminate the data as the cause. When this process fails, I generally find that the spreadsheet has something odd going on, such as pasted text, etc.  SAS Enterprise Guide has some sample spreadsheets available, which I use in this example.

The SupplyInfo.xls spreadsheet is available in the SAS Enterprise Guide Sample data sub-directory. It has two sheets: Suppliers and Shippers.  Let’s import the Suppliers spreadsheet for some quick analysis. Here is the location of my sample files.  [Read Create Your Own Sample Data for SAS BI for ideas about where other sample data lives.]

Import Your Excel Spreadsheet

I’m using SAS Enterprise Guide 5.1; as far as I can tell the wizard has not changed much from earlier releases so you should be able to follow along.

1 – From SAS Enterprise Guide, select File > Import Data.   2 – In the Open window, navigate to the where the spreadsheet is stored and select it. The Import Data Wizard appears.
	3 – SAS populates the Specify Data window with the source spreadsheet and suggests loading the spreadsheet into the WORK library. Click Next to continue. Use the Browse button if you want to make changes.
4 – In the Select Data Source window, select the sheet you want to import.   For this example, you are importing the entire spreadsheet so you only need to select the spreadsheet name.  The first row has the column names.   You might want to experiment later with just importing certain row and columns to see how SAS handles it.
	5. In the Define Field Attributes window, you can make decisions about the individual data items.  For instance, you may want a field brought in as character (string) instead of a number. The SupplierID data item is all numbers so SAS guessed it was Number.  This is a common instance where you might prefer this value to be treated as a character.
6 – The last window allows you a few choices to change before the import.

Viewing the Results

After the import completes you will have a fresh dataset to use for analysis.

Modifying the Import

If you don’t like how the data appears, you can ticker with the results.  The Modify Task button re-starts the Data Import wizard.  You can also right-click the Import Data icon to make changes.

 If you later add more rows to the spreadsheet, just Run the Process Flow again.  You can re-import the spreadsheet a thousand times if you want to spend your day doing that.