Blog of SAP Business Intelligence Insights & Information - Lonnie Ayers, CEO and SAP Certified Consultant

5 Reasons a Datawarehouse is Critical to a solid Balanced Scorecard

  

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Recently completed the Balanced Scorecard bootcamp given by the palladium group and was very impressed by how mature the concept had become.   Of course, as a SAP BW practitioner, and Strategy Management consultant, I was interested in the impact of today’s datawarehouse technology on the concept of Balanced Scorecard.

It is currently estimated that bad data cost the U.S. economy more than $600,000,000,000.00 a year, roughly equivalent to the government stimulus program.  What does this little tidbit have to do with the Balanced Scorecard.

• Our old friends, bad data, as previously noted, can render attempts at making analytical decisions in support of your strategy. 
  With the ability to rapidly perform analytics, and drill down to the root cause, you may be able to discover the ‘truth’ of what part of your strategy actually works and what doesn’t, even when it appears that none of it does.  In other words,  bad data may hide the fact that a new hotel promotion is actually just cannibalizing your existing customer base.
• The necessity of a solid datawarehouse is now recognized as part of the required infrastructure to enable the effective development of strategy.
• The ability to execute the strategy, the whole point of the balanced scorecard approach, is greatly enhanced by the use of both a solid BSC tool, such as SAP SSM (SAP Strategy Management) and of course, it needs a solid data warehouse to work effectively.
• With a robust datawarehouse, you will have the data to formulate more advanced, fact based strategies, and to sense and respond to them as new data comes in.
• You also benefit greatly when formulating a strategy when you have data available from a datawarehouse, such as SAP BW.  It really can you help explore what is possible, quickly, versus putting it together from all the spreadsheets you have around.

Our recommendation:  Get you datawarehouse up and running sooner, rather than later, and leverage that work to enhance your strategy development and execution process.  Get it right, and you almost guaranteed to blow away your competitors.

Thanks

Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

President, SAP BW Consulting, Inc.

Lonnie.Ayers@SAPBWConsulting.com