APOS Well Managed BI CMM

Do you consider your BI platform well managed? How do you measure well managed? Is "well managed" something you can quantify?

The APOS BI CMM (capability maturity model) can help you come to terms with these questions and benchmark your BI deployment so you can quantify its progress toward well managed BI. The APOS BI CMM consists of three levels:

• Curative - reactive activities, firefighting
• Preventive - actively seeking out problems before they happen
• Progressive - proactively seeking new opportunities to expand the use and ROI of your BI platform for the benefit of different business units

Think of your BI deployment as a pyramid divided amongst these three levels. The size of each division within the pyramid represents the proportion of your resources' time dedicated to those types of activities. While all BI deployments require each type of activity, your BI platform can be considered well managed if you progressively minimize the time your resources dedicate to curative and preventive activities and redeploy those resources to progressive activities.

The objective of well managed BI is to invert the pyramid:

The term "well managed" may be qualitative and subjective, rather than quantitative and objective, but what you can quantify is how much time your resources dedicate to their various tasks and responsibilities. By benchmarking these hours, you can chart your course toward progressive BI and judge the relative efficacy of each step you take.

To benchmark your BI maturity, look at your resources' timesheets. Make a list of the activities they report, and classify each according to whether it is curative, preventive, or progressive. (If you have a hard time with this part of the exercise, you might have to reconsider the way your resources report to you.) Record the time spent on each activity through a period of time long enough to cover your basic business cycles (e.g., monthly quarterly, annual).

As you implement well managed BI best practices and undertake progressive initiatives, you should notice a marked shift in the proportion of curative to preventive to progressive.