COVER STORY
training than expected. But Scullion observed that engaging the business directly in any form of BI engagement was a prerequisite to its success. “A case in point is that I don’t work for IT,
but for the business – my line of business is finance,” he said. “There are third parties that think about the architectures. My role is to act as a conduit to deliver the dashboards. I’ve seen it done more traditionally, but think there’s a need for somebody with business acumen driving development, otherwise the traditional waterfall approach to development would be too slow.” He added that Carphone Warehouse sees its approach to development as, “agile, with a small ‘a’”. “Everybody in the business is an analyst
added complexity as far the MicroStrategy app development is concerned”. Looking ahead, Scullion suggested that there
were BI opportunities to be had with cloud computing and big data. “There’s an immediate win by putting MicroStrategy in the cloud but still keeping the data in-house,” he explained. “This takes away the need to manage upgrades and so on. We can plug the data in to the end user from the data warehouse.” But he also warned: “Data inaccuracies tend to occur when you don’t have a single version of the truth.” Another important consideration aside from
the technology or processes being optimised, are the people, who play a vital role in any BI deployment. When the BI Leadership Forum polled 234 executives last year, the number one challenge of self-service BI that emerged among 71% of respondents was that it requires more
Carphone Warehouse Lakeside store
to some extent and the MicroStrategy work is designed to stop them being report writers and make them consumers of business information,” he continued. “We have very short cycles of development, demo and feedback. We play that back to the business stakeholders, including branch and regional managers and, maybe a week or so later, we play the changes back to them.” After going through this iterative cycle a few
times, Scullion said the benefit of garnering feedback throughout was that the business people engaged with the process feel they had a part in developing the dashboard. “They become advocates for it with other end users and their peers,” he added. And the company has taken care to design its new consultant dashboard to be intuitive. “If you can use our website, you can use our dashboard,” he concluded. And soon Carphone Warehouse customers should be able to see, feel and touch the benefits of better informed staff – coming soon to a store near you.
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
Autumn 2013
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