SAP BI Maturity Model

The implementation of SAP BI starts with operational reporting ie reporting on the operational data sources. Mostly the users run queries on operational data sources. What happens is that, this creates a reporting backlog. As a result the customer needs Ad Hoc reporting or self service reporting. So this can be achieved by putting a Ad Hoc tool on top of the operational data source.

The operation data sources are not really designed for the end users to make senses of the data. This actually creates a little bit of a challenge here. This is the data challenge. So the customers start to do data marting projects and this is largely to expand the Ad Hoc initiative.

Once they are done with data marting, they also start to do things like Dashboards. They want to do this for making better decisions. They do it on single data sources and multi data sources. So they are actually building more and more data marts. This gives them more holistic view of the business. And then what is going to happen in the company is that there is going to be scorecard like initiatives.

This will create another data challenge that is going to drive data warehouses. This is where the scorecard initiatives starts to span the entire enterprise and moves into things like balance scorecards. Once all this is done, the company starts to build things like analytical applications.

The most exciting part of this is that the value to the business increases as we move through the above explained maturity model of business intelligence.