In the first decade of this century, the Bose Corporation is a major player in the high-end segment for audio equipment and home entertainment systems.
Camillus Business Services has been facilitating the BI team lead/ architect role in the European BI team. In this role, increased quality, usage and coordination of the BI efforts across Europe as well as between the European branch and the corporate headquarters in the United Sates has been ensured.
Architecture
BI Architecture comprises the complete operational environment of the BI delivery. Obviously it includes systems and software, of the right versions and connected appropriately.
But apart from that, the architecture comprises the people and processes that are engaged to produce the optimal result from the technology. This is critical, and sometimes overlooked.
This team and the processes are especially important in the data and analytics realm, where the intimacy with business context, conflicts with the traditional approach of off-shoring IT capacity for cheap, generic, delivery.
At Bose, an excellent team-mix, and a thorough data management and -documentation approach has made sure to increase BI-application usage from 15 monthly users, to around 200 concurrent users (of a 1500 user-base) in the space of 4 years.
Team and technology
The subsequent BI Architects have created a BI department consisting of technology consultants and business consultants, working to support and develop an ever-increasing offer of BI tools to the business.
The responsibilities of this team extend from maintenance and support of the ‘legacy’ SAP BW3.5 system, to implementing a new BI7.0 system to pair with an SAP CRM system and an SAP 4.7 system for budgeting, planning and analysis of customer interaction and logistical and financial processes.
Sustained asset development
Camillus Business Services was responsible for creating templates for report documentation, indexing “canned” reports and implementing a self-service BI process.
The developed reports and datasets are supported by automated data refreshed, controls (verifying updated balances with the source systems) and incidents are reported to the IT service desk and user community automatically. Incidents, including during data refreshes, are being handled via the Bose IT-service desk, with second- and 3-line support by the team.
Dataset documentation and change-logging are provided on intranet site (MS SharePoint), including validation (testing) instructions, so users and support can verify data accuracy.
The rigorous quality of the deliverables has proven invaluable for usage, trust and value-generation.
The strength of the team
The strength of the Bose Business Intelligence team was based on a few principles:
Business inclusion
The inclusion of (former) business operators in the development team reinforced the connections of the team with the user base. It also improved insight in the context of the requirements. The quality of the deliverables has been profoundly enhanced by this.
Shared End-to-end expertise
All team members shared expertise of the complete data-trajectory in the back-end and the front-end of the solution. This means that everybody could take up all incidents and changes. Personal preferences and talents varied of course, but everyone in the team could step in to perform all tasks or investigate business questions.
Diversity
Even if all team members could take up all parts of the development process, there was a good mix of personalities by nationality, gender and professional background. This produced a variety in primary expertise and personal preferences that allowed the team to achieve excellence in all parts of the development, from data-logistics and transformation coding, to planning, communication and training.
