Iridium’s BI Bill of Rights: Twenty critical factors for selecting your BI solution
You need a tool set to guide you through the selection process: what to look for, what to avoid and what you didn’t even know to avoid! This business intelligence bill of rights provides a road map for firms on how they can select, implement and customize BI solutions to get great results, fast performance and excellent value.
THE ARTICLES
These articles are not listed in order of priority (except for the first one) because your priorities might be different from other firms. You are free to organize, prioritize and even delete from the articles based on the BI requirements for your firm.
When selecting and implementing a BI solution, you have the right to:
1. Get All Your Required Customizations (and Fast!): It can be argued that this is the only article that must be given highest priority by all firms. All legal and professional services firms are different; they have variations in location, business focus, practice management system, accounting practice, system configuration and customization. There never has been and never will be one BI system that works out of the box for all firms. If your BI system does not match your firm’s business model, nomenclature and financial calculations, the BI project will fail. The ability of your BI vendor to deliver your customizations is of critical importance. Another area in which to demand excellence is how long it takes to deliver your customizations. If the vendor’s customization framework requires you to wait for the next product release, imagine your frustration when the customization does not work and the fix gets pushed to a future release. You need all of your customizations, and you need them delivered in a reasonable timeframe.
2. Fast Dashboards and Queries: Imagine you have deployed beautiful, informative, fully customized dashboards that take 20 seconds for each screen refresh. Nothing will suppress user adoption and enthusiasm more than slow dashboards. Not only is slow refresh time frustrating, it wastes valuable time. Your power users might be more forgiving if their reports are taking several minutes to run, because they are being spared from writing difficult queries. But are your partners and executive team going to be willing to patiently wait for their results? Your BI dashboards should provide a similar user experience to the inquiry-based websites you visit every day. For example, when online and there is a five-second refresh to show the performance of your stock portfolio over the last 12 months, that seems reasonable. A timekeeper wants to see their YTD performance metrics, a five-second wait would be reasonable time frame. Some screens (especially at the total firm, office or department level) might take longer, but the average refresh time of all dashboards should be around five seconds.
3. Buy with Confidence: If a vendor believes in their products, they should have policies that allow you to buy with confidence. The only way you can be truly confident the BI solution meets your needs is to see it running with your data. The vendor can address this requirement in several ways: • Offering a proof-of-concept demo • Giving you a trial period • Offering a 90-day unconditional money back guarantee You are entitled to strong and contractual assurances that the performance and capabilities you were shown during the demo process are going to be achieved during your deployment.
4. Get into Production Quickly: Once your firm has purchased a BI solution, get into production quickly. A reasonable expectation is that basic system install should be completed in a couple of weeks. Some deliverables will obviously take longer: profitability implementations, budget implementations, completing cube modifications, coding custom reports and dashboards. The key point is to enable your power users to start working with the cubes and testing the dashboards as quickly as possible.
5. Role-Appropriate Content: One set of dashboards will not work for all timekeepers and decision-makers in the firm. In fact, anyone who is a partner, executive, office manager, etc. will require multiple sets of dashboards for each of his or her firm roles. When users are assigned to “higher level” roles, there are two changes in their content.
• They see a bigger slice of the data, such as the performance of all timekeepers in the department they manage • They should see more dashboards and content.
For example, office managers should have additional dashboards to enable them to compare the performance of participating attorneys in their offices.
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