No guidance, no methodology

No woman, no cry

Life writes interesting stories. There was an urgent need to quickly redefine current OLAP cubes for official reporting purposes since old reporting system suffered from permanent instability. Term official reports means reporting toward board, owners, supervisory, agency and etc. Old business intelligence data cubes generated non trustable key performance indicators due to poor data and definition integration. For example marketing generated one figure and finance generated other figure for something that looked like same key performance indicator. Then management compare their reports and find out they can not trust to own reports. Usually it is always different performance indicator but with wrong and inadequate interpretation.

It would be relatively easy to make specification toward IT to implement redefined reporting theme with all necessary documentation with clear guidance form methodology department. Well, here comes life spice out, methodology had no clue how to do it and did not want to be involved in the project lead. There was no official business dictionary from other companies in same industry. To sumarize, there was no guidance at all.

When there is no clear guidance for company here is one advice what to do.

Do it like open source philosophy does, include all interested parties and guide their knowledge toward problem solution. Make workshops with all relevant experts and make common official definitions. Use energy from your colleges and build it within documents. Note all exceptions and all possible problems. Afterwards coordinate documentation distribution to all relevant parties. Coordinate knowledge creation instead to wait somebody else to deliver missing business knowledge.

Who ever wants to make very detailed specialized internal reports should have in mind clear connectivity on aggregated level with referential report. It is similar action like adding an add-on (add-in, plug-in) to certain application.