Business Intelligence Governance

Effective BI governance is the lynch-pin of any effective BI strategy. While many organizations have implemented some form of BI governance, most lack a comprehensive strategy that properly balances engagement, content management, and access control. There are a number of indicators that define whether or not an effective BI governance strategy is in place.

In a well-governed BI Environment, all of the following is true:

1. Content is secure, but most reporting in BI platforms is not hidden from business users.
2. Self-service BI works because business users can access a clean uncluttered Bi environment
3. Data quality is a part of every BI Solution which means that Users can trust the reporting
4. BI Tools are highly utilized by users for day-to-day decision making.
5. BI Analysts spend most of their time on high-value BI Projects rather than continually fighting fires

If your BI governance framework is not yielding the above results, your governance toolkit and processes are falling short.

A comprehensive BI Governance strategy extends well beyond security and basic data governance. It must provide a holistic toolkit that simultaneously builds trust with the user community and focuses on BI resource optimization.

Access control in a governed environment is about achieving a balance between security and discoverability. The right balance of security and discoverability presents users with enough information about discoverable content to allow them to enable them to request access, while simultaneously protecting sensitive corporate data from unauthorized access.

Metric Insights enables analysts to publish content that is discoverable to users who have not explicitly been assigned access.

To generate trust and transparency in a BI System, users must be presented with sufficient metadata about a visualization so that they see the data in the visualization in context.  Critical metadata must be fully searchable and must include:

• Certification details that tell the business user which data steward is vouching for the dataset included in the visualization.
• Tags that provide meaningful classification for each report available to an end user in the catalog
• Engagement metrics that help an end user understand the relative popularity of a report
• Lineage information to inform users of the specific data sources behind a visualization
• Documentation that tracks all enhancements made to a visualization along with changes to the business rules used to calculate metrics in the data.

Metric Insights provides the capability to extend existing BI tool metadata with custom fields, certification workflows and documentation.

Widespread usage of analytics by users across the various business units in your organization is the single most effective measure of effective BI governance processes.   Any comprehensive BI governance program must collect and leverage usage data to support the following goals:

• Understand overall usage patterns of key data assets to maximize value from BI investments in the data warehouse, Big Data lakes, and reporting.
• Identify opportunities to improve overall user experience by redesigning reporting whose functionality does not effectively support the associated business process.
• Understand which BI implementations represent successes with high user engagement and where a different approach is required.

Metric Insights captures comprehensive usage statistics and provides the necessary tools to understand engagement over time and optimize the content catalog for users.

Effectively managing BI Tool licensing is an essential element of BI Tool governance. This process involves the detailed analysis of usage and the performance of 3 critical functions:

• Determine which users are not utilizing their assigned licenses so that unused licenses can be de-allocated.
• Identify users who are under-utilizing their assigned license.  For example, some users who hold a content creator license may only be viewing content.  These licenses can be downgraded.
• Implementing a technology to facilitate the request and provisioning of licenses and granting of access to users who do not currently use a BI Tool license but require access to a visualization.

Metric Insights collects BI tool metadata and identifies opportunities to provision, de-provision or downgrade tool licenses to optimize BI spend.