ONCE THE DESIGN, development and implementation steps of a business intelligence (BI) project have been completed most organisations expect to sit back, relax and begin reaping the rewards. But in order to ensure the ongoing efficacy of a BI system it needs to be maintained. And that's best left to the experts.

Although there's a fair amount of reward reaping in the offing once a BI project reaches its initial stage of maturity there's still quite a bit of effort required from the client. Rian Durandt, business unit manager for BI at SA Microsoft developer 3fifteen, says much ongoing effort is required to keep a BI solution delivering value. "In fact, I'd honestly go so far as to say once a project has drawn to a close ongoing maintenance is the critical success factor in any successful BI solution.

"The reason is simple: the moment data within the data warehouse is allowed to age, become inaccurate or incomplete, the business answers delivered by the BI solution become inaccurate. And should the business follow any of the guidance provided by its BI system in that kind of scenario the effects can be catastrophic."

Durandt says knock on effects can vary in severity from the company losing revenue due to it being inadequately or overly geared for a certain level of productivity, to the management team's faith in the credibility of the BI solution disappearing. "Every organisation must therefore understand the importance of maintaining its BI solution. It's a massive investment for most companies - they should guard it and look after it carefully."

Unfortunately, deciding to perform ongoing maintenance of a BI solutions and actually engaging in that maintenance are very different things. Durandt says every BI solution relies heavily on the underlying data stored in the company's data warehouse. "And by definition the data warehouse touches every system and division in the business. Therefore, maintaining a BI solution is an all-encompassing, multi-disciplined and rather complex task. Furthermore, it's also one of the most thankless jobs in existence.

"Even an extremely specialised data warehouse manager will be unable to ensure that the quality of the data in a warehouse exceeds the level of accuracy it had when it was first built. So being the best you can possibly be at this job simply means you're able to continue delivering a consistent level of quality - there are no improvements to be had. And that's a demotivating factor. It's no surprise that data warehouse management skills are some of the most difficult to maintain in the current market."

Due to the difficulties companies generally experience in retaining those members of staff, Durandt says more organisations are beginning to outsource their BI maintenance function. "And if you look at it there's few other jobs more suited to outsourcing than this. It's a technically difficult task to perform, it touches every aspect of the business, has a strong trust issue associated with it and is relatively thankless.

"Because outsourcers can keep things interesting for their staffers by rotating them between different clients I think customers will also feel good about outsourcing this task. Nine out of 10 clients we carry out a BI project for are now taking that route and we'd recommend the rest of the industry should follow suit."

Finweek - Brett Haggard