This research describes how Komercni banka (KB) has been operating an enterprisewide business intelligence (BI), analytics and performance management (PM) portfolio since 2000, providing a broad range of solutions and supporting numerous processes vital for the bank. This analysis will be useful to all BI leaders, especially in financial services, to understand that BI is, above all, a program and not a project.

• KB established a BI competency center (BICC) that has maintained momentum, fostered senior management involvement and continually evolved the company's BI and corporate PM (CPM) strategy over 10-plus years.

• KB deployed an enterprisewide BI, analytics and PM initiative encompassing all functional areas of the business.

• Strong BI leadership and senior management sponsorship have ensured KB staying the course.

• KB's BI, analytics and PM program has been successful, primarily because of senior sponsorship, the BICC team and the use of a phased approach to address specific pain points in order of priority.

• BI is a program (organization unit) and not a project. Be prepared to be patient for results, and to continue to invest in BI to reap significant benefits.

• Focus your BI investments on initiatives that resolve key business issues, and those that the business has identified, such as revenue growth and customer retention. This will likely yield the highest returns and easily gain support from the business.

• If not already in place, a BICC should be introduced to unite the enterprise with a single approach to BI, analytics and PM.

This document was revised on 8 March 2011. For more information, see the Corrections page.

In February 2010, KB won Gartner's BI Excellence Award competition. KB demonstrated in very clear terms how it was able to use technology for quantifiable business benefits. It showed that BI is not a one-time investment, and that significant business benefit happened over several years. Over the last 10 years, KB has made significant investments in a data warehouse (DWH) and in management information systems (MISs) that hold data for the whole bank and, increasingly, for the KB Group, and made available a large amount of detailed information for everyday decision making on all levels, ranging from relationship managers up to the CEO. Thus, KB would be considered a Level 4 (where Level 5 is the highest) organization using Gartner's Maturity Assessment for Business Intelligence and PM.

KB provides comprehensive services to clients in areas including retail, corporate and investment banking. Companies in the KB financial group offer further services, such as private pension schemes, building society saving schemes, factoring, consumer finance and insurance. KB is part of the Societe Generale (SG) Group, one of the largest banking groups in the eurozone in terms of market capitalization, and KB Group's 8,843 employees serve more than 2.7 million clients.

Before privatization, the bank needed a "single version of the truth" to transform a bank struggling with losses into a profitable financial institution. Ongoing issues that led to the evolution include:

• The distribution division required a strong and trustworthy system for performance monitoring and management. Key performance indicators (KPIs), analytic reports and a performance reporting program were launched.

• The risk division had to observe various external (regulatory authorities) or internal (SG) rules: Anti-money-laundering (AML) and Basel II Internal Ratings Based (IRB) advanced projects were introduced.

• The marketing division requested analytical CRM, operational CRM for wholesale, campaign management and a system for supporting new product development and monitoring.

• The finance and strategy division drove a system for financial management of the company — solutions included MIS, asset liability management (ALM), external reporting, KB Group solutions, planning and budgeting.

Overall, the bank wanted to change the ratio of its time from being spent mostly on data gathering to being spent mostly on data analysis. KB recognized that its client- and performance-based information could become one of its most important assets if only it could be harnessed properly.

In 1999, the board approved the DWH implementation, and in 2000, the CFO started to sponsor a joint MIS (financial management of the company) and DWH team. This was the initial focus and first development of what would gradually become an enterprisewide BI, analytics and PM portfolio.

The business strategy promoted information as a key competitive advantage, and this strategy was advocated by the BICC. Due to the bank's prior work embracing BI, it was able to draw BICC members from its independent BI department (formerly MIS and DWH joint teams). The BI department reports to the finance and strategy team. The whole BI initiative is sponsored by the CFO, mainly in a project-based approach for business activities, and partly in a strategic approach for infrastructure. BICC's people and processes characteristics are:

• BICC is a very stable team, currently around 70 internal full-time equivalents (FTEs): 49% have worked in BI for more than six years, 78% more than two years and most of the rest are newcomers.

• The BICC structure is highly business-oriented; a significant part is in daily contact with the business (BI project leaders and ad hoc analysts).

• BICC growth required an enhancement of internal processes using ITIL through a service catalog and SLAs, deployment processes and quality assurance.

• IT performs low-level support (operational systems and networking).

• BI services are available to all employees: currently 6,000-plus standard users and 100-plus power users.

The deployment approach is no "big releases," but rather a "continuous deployment," i.e., small changes released into production almost every day:

• Smooth deployment is enforced by tracked internal workflows in the project tracking (Jira) system, including performance metrics and parameters (time frames for particular steps and quality trackers).

• Workflows differ for particular task types. Deployment workflows always contain verification of solutions and of solution metadata. Several automated tools are used to support this verification performing checks of hundreds of rules to ensure quality of metadata for further processing.

• Investment in the solution acceptance for big project rollouts changing basic processes: Use of site visits and road shows to promote the solution, and to provide presentations and training.

• Special postimplementation hot line support.

• Teradata hardware upgrades are anticipated a year ahead. Teradata software upgrades preparations start half a year before the go decision.

Figure 1 represents the scope and timeline of solutions deployed by KB. It shows that a steady phased approach to BI, analytics and PM has built up over the past 12 years. Deliverables were planned, according to greatest business need as prioritized by the BICC, for each year in functional deliverables in order to shorten development time scales and ease end-user adoption. For a summary of the project details, see Notes 1 and 2.

Figure 2 represents key milestones of BI delivery mapped against KB performance over the last decade.

KB has standardized on a key set of technologies for each of its system layers as follows:

• DWH: KB selected Teradata (from a shortlist that included Oracle, SAS, Sybase and Teradata). The KB solution has grown extensively over the last decade, and the current production size is 5,420GB with over 24,000 tables and 7,000 views. The core DWH alone is over 1,600GB, and the data marts are also nearing 1,900GB in size.

• Information management: Sybase PowerDesigner for data architecture and information architecture, Informatica for data integration, Jira for process workflows and Confluence for documentation and the knowledge base.

• BI platform: Cognos was used across the organization, including the performance reporting program for distribution and financial performance of organizational, product and customer dimensions.

• CPM: Cognos Planning was selected.

• Analytic applications: Cliview (an internally developed operational CRM), SAS, Kxen and TeraData TeraMiner (data mining).

Figure 3 represents the current KB BI system architecture.

KB believes one key strength of its BI capability is the establishment of a unified database and combined financial/nonfinancial KPIs that covers the core functions of the bank and incorporates financial, risk, operational and management information into a single system that supports all forms of decision making. Specific benefits obtained include:

• Basel II IRB advanced: A must-have program, this met the original expectations and achieved 100% of the goals. The project supported a capital allocation decrease of 25% for KB only and 17% for the KB group, and KB estimates benefits of $21.5 million (490 million Czech korunas).

• Analytical CRM and campaign management: The average campaign response rate increased from 3% to 6%.

• Operational CRM: Financial benefits $2.5 million (53 million Czech korunas) a year for at least three years versus total costs of $3.1 million (65 million Czech korunas). These benefits far exceeded expectations, and the net present value came to zero a year earlier than expected.

• Enterprise performance management (EPM) program: Remuneration in distribution (i.e., compensation for sellers/agents) based on EPM reports. One of the most used BI solutions, a large solution, continuously "alive," frequently used and heavily developed.

Table 1 summarizes the number of users spread over the BI investments (also see Note 3) now in place at KB.

KB's approach shared the following critical success factors with other BI Excellence Award winners and finalists:

• Sponsorship for BI at the top of the organization and broadly across the company.

• Collaboration, communication and cross-business teamwork on BI, which helped to raise its maturity level and improve business processes around decision making.

• BICC as a specialist group to drive BI over the long term.

Specific critical success factors for KB were:

• "Physical" concept of BICC with business-oriented structure: central unit providing consistent, reliable and trustworthy information, generally taken as the core source for analytical inquiries.

• Strong technical concept (FS-LDM, 3NF, metadata, methodologies, systems, etc.)

• A purely business-driven approach when extending the business solution. All business requirements must have a business sponsor, and must be prioritized and/or approved at an appropriate project-scale committee. BI gets its own funding for specific infrastructure projects only.

• Project-based approach for business solutions is supplemented with a more strategic approach (driven by the BICC) when enlarging the infrastructure.

• Supporting all three company execution levels: operational (everyday performance reporting for bank advisors), tactical reports for middle management and dashboards for top management.

• Strategic partnership with vendors/suppliers. Five main suppliers working on yearly based general contracts ensuring stable teams and good people with 'everyday' fights in internal project or small enhancement tenders. Most projects in fixed-time, fixed-price mode.

KB's BI and financial leaders state that they learned the following key lessons:

• The executive board's support throughout the 10-plus years of BI in KB was a must. The BI initiative must be business-driven, with an approved business case for each project. The strategic approach is the proper one for infrastructure projects. A stand-alone BI department representing BICC proves that added value is not in technologies, but in work with information. As a consequence of the BICC, KB's information factory is less dependent on particular people, and more dependent on rigorous process.

• Prototyping makes sense when the requirements are not clearly defined, and the scale is large (Basel II IRB advanced and profitability in CPM).

• Big rollouts changing core processes require investments in people's acceptance and adoption.

• Compliance projects can also rigorously support key business activities, rather than just meet regulatory demands; for example, integration of transactions in AML for regulatory reporting and linked to analytical CRM has driven financial gains and reduce fraud.

• DWH as a shared component considerably cuts costs for other projects. Incremental development is less risky and more flexible. Ensuring trustworthiness and transparency for users, powered by metadata, is vital.