If your business intelligence (BI) program needs a shot of energy, extra hands to meet growing business demands, or help migrating  to a new environment, you might consider a BI SWAT team. Modeled after police SWAT units, a BI SWAT team can reinvigorate a BI program that suffers from poor design, development backlogs, or other ailments, and it can deliver the all-important "quick win" that transforms a failing BI program, giving it instant credibility in the eyes of business leaders.

SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics and refers to a highly trained police unit, which uses military-style weapons and specialized tactics to perform high-risk operations, such as rescuing hostages, confronting terrorists, and handling dangerous arrests. In other words, a SWAT team tackles the most challenging situations that regular police officers are not trained or equipped to handle.

The same holds true for a BI SWAT team. With backing from top executives and an arsenal of modern tools and techniques, a BI SWAT team can reinvigorate an ailing BI program that suffers from poor design, development backlogs, inflexible reports, insufficient funding or any number of ailments that can afflict a BI program. It can deliver the all-important “quick win” that instantly transforms the fortunes of a failing BI program, giving it instant credibility in the eyes of business leaders who now fight with each other to fund new projects and partner with the BI team.

Successful BI programs can also benefit from SWAT teams, too.  Afflicted by the “curse of success,” a BI team that is overwhelmed with requests might turn to a SWAT team to keep departmental and divisional leaders from hiring their own SWAT teams (i.e., external consultancy) and creating analytical silos. It might also hire a SWAT team to tackle a gnarly problem or manage a high-profile project that the internal team doesn’t have the time or skills to handle.

Sultan of SWAT

A BI SWAT is a small, self-organizing team of internal and external experts whose skills enable them to build entire solutions in six to 12 weeks. The team is led by a BI program manager—either an external consultant or internal BI director—who helps define the development roadmap with business leaders and then guides the SWAT team on its journey. The team itself consists of technical experts, who are generally external consultants, and business subject matter experts (SMEs), who are always internal employees.

Technical team. On the technical side, there is a business savvy data architect who gathers requirements and builds data models, an ETL architect that profiles source data, creates mappings, and develops ETL programs, and a BI architect who builds and administers the dashboards or reports and trains users. There may also be part-time technical resources, such as a database administrator and Q/A specialist,

Business team. On the business side, there is a subject matter expert (SME), usually a business analyst who knows the business, processes, people, and data, and a source system analyst who knows the data in the source systems and/or data warehouse. These SWAT team members roll off the team once the application is built and are replaced by others who are familiar with the next application on the SWAT roadmap. In addition, the BI architect generally stays with the newly built application to train users and enhance and maintain the application.

The speed with which a SWAT team works depends on the complexity and condition of a company’s current BI and data environment. In a dysfunctional BI environment, the SWAT team’s program manager (in this case an external consultant) and data architect might spend the first 6 to 12-week iteration getting the lay of the business and data landscape and helping the company prioritize applications using a risk/reward matrix. And they may need another six to 12 week period to install new tools and technologies and convene a data governance committee of SMEs who can define core metrics and terms for the first several applications.

In a well-managed BI environment, the SWAT team tackles a high priority project or two that the current BI team doesn’t have the time or skill to execute. In this case, an internal program manager creates the project plan, hires the SWAT team, and oversees their work. The BI SWAT spends two weeks getting oriented to the project and then dives in, spinning out working code in short sprints with major deliverables every 6 to 12 weeks.

Deliver Value Fast

Think global, act local. The goal of a BI SWAT team—especially in a dysfunctional BI environment—is to move quickly and deliver value fast. It should not be constrained by architectural standards except that the applications it builds should plug into a larger framework (i.e. enterprise data model), where practical. The team’s mantra is “think global, act local” where velocity and value are king.

If the team needs to take a shortcut and break a key architectural standard (i.e. create an independent data mart with a non-standard BI tool), it does so consciously, knowing that it will need to refactor the application at a later date, perhaps spending another six to 12 week increment doing so.  By this point, the team has gained enough credibility with the business that it can spend time refactoring applications and building out the company’s architecture and compute infrastructure.

Parallel development. Once the SWAT team proves it can deliver value quickly, the business might decide to fund multiple SWAT teams or replace the consultants with new full-time staff (or ideally hire the consultants.) Since a SWAT team often consolidates or replaces a hodge-podge of reports and data marts or entire data warehouses, this frees up existing staff to build out the new environment. But not all staff can make the transition. Usually, the new team needs new skills and roles—perhaps a business-savvy BI manager, a Hadoop administrator or a BI relationship manager—that don’t exist on the current team. Some staff members might be able to transition into the new roles, other won’t.

Federated BI. The SWAT team also lays the groundwork for a federated BI organization—the only kind that really delivers BI value consistently fast—since it rolls off BI developers into each department where it deploys a new application. These BI developers report into the business unit but have a dotted line relationship to the corporate BI director, who reviews their performance and pays their bonus. This reporting relationship is the glue that holds a distributed BI organization together and forms the centerpiece of a BI Center of Excellence.

Summary. There is a lot to like about a BI SWAT team. Although it is not appropriate for every organization, it can turbocharge stalled BI programs that have lost the confidence of the business and assist well-run BI programs that can’t keep up with demand for their services. A BI SWAT team can resurrect a failing BI program and prevent a program on the rise from drowning in its success losing momentum.