Top 3 Powerful Controls Tools to Empower BI Teams

In this post I’m going to share the top 3 powerful controls tools to empower BI Teams and improve process efficiency, reduce risk and ensure compliance with corporate policies.  Designed well, these tools can be complimentary and have little impact on an Analyst’s time. However, poorly designed tools are often unsuccessful, frustrating detractors.  Whether you adopt existing tools or build your own like me, here are ones that that will really empower your BI Team.

The top 3 powerful controls tools to empower BI Teams includes 1) Inventory Management, 2) Request Intake and 3) Version Control.  An honorable mention is a robust publishing/access portal which I’ll cover as well.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Whether you have a suite of 20 reports or 3,000, it’s critical to track metadata about your inventory.  Reports often run for years, and it’s easy to forget they exist, who maintains them or why they are needed.  In addition, with the importance of making data-driven decisions, corporate governance is increasingly needing visibility into what is produced. 

Many teams start off by tracking their inventory in an excel spreadsheet and eventually graduating to a SharePoint site. Teams with larger inventories will leverage applications to provide additional functionality, control access, and maintain data integrity.  If you currently have a small but growing inventory, then I highly recommend migrating up sooner rather than later.  The migration process can be time consuming with larger inventories and something everyone would like to avoid if possible!

Aside from the platform, it’s also important to decide which data points you choose to track.  Then you will need to decide which fields are required vs. nice-to-have optional fields. It is also worth the time to try and predict future needs.  For example, if you envision migrating data platforms, you might want a data platform field to track migration progress.

Here are the inventory sections you want to consider:

1. Report Basics: These core fields are going to cover things like the name, description, purpose, and status of the report.
2. Stakeholders: Who are the important people related to the report?  This can include the team manager, primary and back up analysts, and a main contact from the business.
3. Delivery Information: Fields covering the refresh frequency, report format, automated vs. manual, delivery method, and any SLAs on delivery times.
4. Architecture: Includes data sources, data platforms used and other technical details relevant to infrastructure dependencies the report has.
5. Governance: Provides metadata around the criticality to the business, potential risks if inaccurate and business processes dependent on the report.
6. Reviews: Inventories are periodically reviewed to determine if a report can be retired, automated or consolidated.  This section contains historical results of those reviews.

REQUEST INTAKE

As a BI Team, you need to track requests for reporting, collect requirements, assign work and manage request backlogs.  More advanced teams will also leverage intake data to support capacity/staffing planning and update discussions with business leaders.

While inventory tools require less interaction, this is really a highly interactive workflow tool moving requests from submission to completion.  You can also use it track more than just requests for new reports or changes to existing reports.  I’ve seen it used for ad-hoc analytics requests, data management, break/fix, project requests and more. 

The tool must handle both internal and external requests, so you need flexibility to have different fields populated based on the request type.  For example, you might need user acceptance testing when creating a new report, but not for a Break/Fix item.

Here are the key sections you will want to have in your intake tool:

1. Request Basics: This covers the core details such as the type of request, description and date of the request.
2. Stakeholders: A few common fields here is the assigned to name, the requestor, the developer, QA tester and others.
3. Priority: More than just High/Medium/Low, you can also prioritize by numerical ranking, requestor due date and expected due date.  I recommend also providing space to justify why something might be designated as urgent (otherwise everything becomes urgent!).
4. Comments: A simple history of comments from people engaged with the request so that you have a record of activity.

VERSION CONTROL

This one can often be overlooked because there isn’t much visibility to it outside of the BI Team itself.  However, this tool provides significant benefits to the team related to efficiency and governance.  A version control tool will track changes to your reporting files (SQL scripts, Tableau workbooks, etc.). This allows you to roll back changes to a prior version, track change authors, and recover deleted files.

Different from inventory and intake tools, this is not a tool that you will want to build yourself.  There are a number of offerings available to meet your needs here, with GIT and Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) being ones I’ve had success with.  The setup of these tools will also vary based on your specific situation.  I’ve seen version control applied to files stored on a Share Drive, Centralized Server and Cloud environments.

You can also level up by importing the metadata around your version control repository into your reporting environment so that you can gain insight into which files are being changed the most, by whom and the volume of changes over time.  With standards on file naming conventions, you can also link files to reports in your inventory, more on that later.

PUBLISHING/ACCESS PORTAL (HONORABLE MENTION)

When I think of a BI Team, I mostly think of producing reports using data visualization tools like Tableau.  However, the reality is that most teams have a mix of reports being delivered through legacy and modern methods.  For example, it’s not unusual to have Excel, SSRS, Tableau and MicroStrategy reports being delivered by a single team. 

In these situations, how your users access this range of solutions becomes a key decision.  Taking Excel as an example, teams can deliver reports via email, posting to SharePoint and saving to a Share Drive.  Each method has different access controls, risks and traceability into who opens it. 

A publishing tool provides a single interface for the analyst to upload their report for user access.  A key attribute of this solution is that it allows access controls at the report level, not the site level.  Also, users do not have the ability modify the report and there is data to track who opens the report. Having usage data where it did not exist previously comes in handy when looking to retire unused reports.

As part of this solution, an Access Portal allows you to have links to other, non-published files.  Perhaps a user has access to an Excel based report and a Tableau report. When accessing the portal, users would see both on screen and could access them from a single location. 

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

If you have read this far, then you really don’t want to miss this part! This is the part where you go next level and really gain visibility into the health of your reports.  By linking your tools through common IDs and field values, you will have more insight into your platform than most teams can only dream of.

Use Case 1

Take the Report ID from your inventory tool and add it to your intake tool. Then you can pull up any report and link back to the original requirements submitted to create it! You’ll also know which reports receive the highest volume of change requests from the business. If you have publishing data on that same ID, you can layer in usage data. And finally, adding an ID to file names in version control shows you which reports require the most maintenance.  Combine this data to give you insights into your platform, such as which reports require more support than justified by use and value!

Use Case 2

Using common fields, such as Line of Business (LOB) names, will permit you to see report and request volume trends side by side for each business area.  You can also get insight into your analyst’s expertise by looking at the LOBs that they work on over time.  This becomes especially important in larger teams where there are frequent changes in staffing, responsibilities and areas of support.

Being able to tie this data together makes it easier to manage your team and respond quickly to inquiries from sources such as audit, governance and compliance.  How you link them is simply a technical solution that you will have to integrate into your tools.  If they are internally built tools, you have greater flexibility on this front as well.

These controls tools are big topics and we’re just scratching the surface here. Later I’ll update this post with links to deeper dives on each of these tools.  And of course, there are other controls tools you can leverage, but hopefully you will agree these are the core tools each BI Team needs.  If you have others that you think worthy of this list, please add a comment below, I’d love to hear about it!