The Five Disciplines of Business Intelligence
By 
A number of years ago the Vice President here at Lancet, Randy Mattran wrote a whitepaper called “The Five Disciplines of Business Intelligence: How Lancet Software Development Views the Scope of Business Intelligence Implementation.” After a number of years in practice this model continues to direct our work and remains as applicable as it was when it was written.
The idea then, as it is now, is that covering these five disciplines (5D) will improve your likelihood of success for any BI deployment. We know that a sustainable BI program is more than the ability to complete a project. The 5D comprehensively defines the functions that all BI initiatives need to address. Here is each of the disciplines with a brief description. You can download your copy of the whitepaper at our Resource Center.
Project Execution: Simply, this is about how projects are completed, based out of the project management best practices. Many organizations have their own project management best practices, built either specifically for BI or other IT projects (such as web development or software development). The important factor is that there is some consideration towards the management of project execution, not which project management discipline to follow. The most important aspect of this work is that you provide a method of repeatedly delivering on expectations with some degree of efficiency and agility.
Operations and Service Level Management (OSLM): Enterprise Data warehouses, by design, are the integration point for a wide rand of transaction and data-change systems. The EDW is impacted by system changes, business process changes, seasonal fluctuations in volume and business growth (such as down-sizing or M & A’s). OSLM encompasses all activities involved with the EDW, including ETL, data marts, cubes, aggregates, etc. It has to be someone’s job to make sure what you built keeps working, and that you have a structure in place to make sure the end-user community continues to have a satisfactory experience from the BI capability. There are nineteen activities in the second discipline to ensure that each of these components is well managed.
Program Management: At some point in your BI journey you will reach the point where you will have a number of BI projects running and they will all need to be managed under one umbrella, hence program management. The one unique aspect of the program management outside of the project management is that the program would continue to function even if there were no ‘projects’ to manage. It might be easy to find funding for discrete new projects, but you also need to drive initiatives which steward development of shared assets, not only for consistency, but also for speed and efficiency in future development. Program management drives and defines the activities of the other four disciplines.
Architecture and Technology: In this context, architecture means information architecture and it is the cornerstone to well executed EDW and BI programs. The goal for information architecture in the 5D is consistency, extensibility and scalability to appropriately support the BI Program. This is one area of BI/DW where predicting the future is critical to laying the foundation for what BI is likely to come. This concept of architecture is critical to BI because it reduces the cost and complexity of individual projects and it avoids scalability constraints, both are key to program success.
Finally, the fifth discipline is….drum roll please
Business Integration: If you create a BI Program without integrating with the business it is bound to be defined outside of a framework of where the actual need exists; a certain recipe for failure. This discipline is the least technical and the most difficult to master, so it is the final discipline addressed because it requires some maturity. The primary goal of this discipline is to foster collaboration between end user organizations and IS to build an invincible bond of trust between information consumers and the capabilities offered by the BI program. When the business truly owns BI, the problems become everyone’s problem, not just another IT failure.
The five disciplines is a simple yet elegant way to approach this work. That is why we placed it as the number two post for our blog on how to get started. If you can review, assess and determine the gaps that you have in your program based on this work you will have a clear roadmap of how to get back on track, or start your BI journey.
