The enterprise architecture group held authority over all aspects of technology at the City, business intelligence included. What it directed was the substance of the thing: the platform analytics would sit on, how it integrated with the rest of the estate, and the standards it had to meet. Delivery sat with a separate standing Business Intelligence Group under its own manager, building and operating inside that direction.
That separation is the design decision, not an org chart accident. Keeping the group that decides what analytics runs on distinct from the group that builds the reports is what stops a reporting practice turning into a second, undocumented architecture — one with its own integrations into the systems of record, its own hosting, and no obligation to reconcile with anything.
The platform was the Microsoft BI stack: SQL Server Analysis Services cubes, SQL Server Reporting Services, and a SharePoint 2013 front end, served at its own enterprise hostname with development and quality assurance siblings alongside production.
The access path
The mapping between internal and public addressing for the business intelligence hosts was held here, along with the SharePoint 2013 name resolution problems behind it. Unglamorous work, and it is the reason a reader should take the environment-separation argument seriously rather than as a principle: the person making it was the one who knew which hostname resolved to which host.
Reporting on the division’s own money
Built SQL Server Reporting Services reporting on ITD billing, index codes, budget comparison and allocations — still running into 2016. The reporting layer over the cost model was from this desk.
A chargeback model an agency cannot read a report out of is a spreadsheet with ambitions. The dispute it was built to make possible never happens, because nobody can see the figure clearly enough to argue with it. That is why the reporting layer is part of the cost model rather than a presentation tier bolted to the end of it — and why the Customer Billing System rebuild spent close to half its recorded hours on reporting.
Built to a published competence standard
The capability was hired to a bar that was written down rather than staffed with whoever was available. Three internal postings inside twelve months set it: a senior business intelligence developer requiring five or more years on the Microsoft BI stack with end-to-end delivery from source to user; a business intelligence developer requiring three or more years, MDX preferred; and a priority-II examination announcement covering Analysis Services.
Alongside the hiring, a six-day course ran in-house after hours, taught by the architect of the JaxAnalytics Finance cube: third normal form to star schema, dimension and fact design, surrogate and foreign keys, hierarchies, degenerate dimensions, fuzzy grouping, slowly changing dimensions, extract-transform-load with full against incremental refresh, and then Analysis Services. Free, internal, taught by the person who had built the thing.
Hiring requirements are a standard like any other. A capability built to a published one can be held to it afterwards, which is the point of publishing it.
Outcome
An analytics capability whose platform decisions were separable from its report-building, and whose competence bar was written down where it could be held to afterwards.