pg. ©2019 alliance data


Speaker Biography

• Brock Dietrich has been at Alliance Data for 19 years, with his first 10

years in the Credit Risk Analytics organization before moving into a variety

of Information Technology roles. This unique background has allowed him

to synthesis business needs with technical capabilities to deliver trusted

solutions for the organization.

• Renee Fronk has been at Alliance Data for ten years as an IT Technical

application manager. She supports MicroStrategy, SAS, Microsoft BI, and

Tableau. She has a total of 14 years of experience using MicroStrategy

across three different companies beginning with MicroStrategy 7.

2


Who is Alliance Data?

Marketing and loyalty experts.

As providers of branded credit cards for top companies, it’s easy to assume

we’re simply a bank – but the truth is, we’re so much more than that.

Focused on growing our partners’ sales (rather than building our own

portfolio), our team of experts is on the cutting edge of marketing, loyalty and

data-driven insights – making us relationship builders who drive results and

create connections. That’s deliberately different, and that’s exactly who we

are.

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Agenda

• Problem Statement

• Scope

• Committee Makeup

• Interviews / Requirements

• Numeric Ranking

• Evaluation Scorecard / Vendor Demonstrations

• Total Cost of Ownership

• Proof of Concept / Final Selection

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Problem Statement

• Excessive resources needed to support multiple tools

- MicroStrategy

- Tableau

- SQL Server BI

- Cognos

- Business Objects

• Inability to share insights across business units

• Lack of governance and consistency of key metrics

• Lack of training / best practices

5


Capability Scope

6


Vendor Scope

• Limited to 26 vendor platforms

in the 2017 Gartner Magic

Quadrant for Business

Intelligence and Analytics

Platforms report

7


Committee Makeup

• Enterprise Data Governance council

• 10 members

• Created sub-committee to address problem

• Nominated delegate from their business unit

• Open committee

• Total of 25 members, 10 delegates had voting rights

8


Interviews

Producers

• Interviewed 130 subject matter experts

• Probed for use cases, data sources, tools, and processes

• Forward-looking topics, such as wish list items and features not yet

available

Consumers

• Focus groups consisting of approximately 50 managers and directors

• Business decisions being made

• Timeliness and trustworthiness of their data

• Desired functionality

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Requirements

• Ability to provide enterprise data models with agreed upon metric calculations (one

version of the truth)

• Ability for end users to ingest their own data and create content without IT

involvement (data discovery)

• Process for migrating user created data from a personal space to a shared

community space, and eventually to a enterprise IT managed space

• Governance and security paramount due to heavily regulated industry

• Overarching theme from the interviews was a governed self-service solution was

required

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Example Use Case

• Credit applications are the lifeblood of our business

• 150+ client relationships

• Client relationship managers closely monitor approval rate metric

• Receive email alert when approval rate outside 1 standard deviation of the mean

• Ability to view historical trends on mobile device and drill into attributes to quickly

identify cause of variance

• Allows relationship manager to engage right resources to resolve potential issue

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Critical Capabilities

Aligned use cases to March 2017 Gartner Critical Capabilities for

Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report.

• Admin, Security and Architecture

• Data Source Connectivity

• Cloud BI

• Self-Contained ETL and Data Storage

• Self-Service Data Preparation

• Metadata Management

• Embedded Advanced Analytics

• Smart Data Discovery

• Interactive Visual Exploration

• Analytic Dashboards

• Mobile Exploration and Authoring

• Embed Analytic Content

• Publish, Share and Collaborate

• Platform and Workflow Integration

• Ease of Use and Visual Appeal

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Numeric Ranking

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Critical Capabilities Weighting

8% Admin, Security and Architecture

15% Data Source Connectivity

1% Cloud BI

4% Self-Contained ETL and Data Storage

7% Self-Service Data Preparation

10% Metadata Management

4% Embedded Advanced Analytics

2% Smart Data Discovery

6% Interactive Visual Exploration

5% Analytic Dashboards

4% Mobile Exploration and Authoring

5% Embed Analytic Content

15% Publish, Share and Collaborate

4% Platform and Workflow Integration

10% Ease of Use and Visual Appeal

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Elimination Process

Sub-committee considered numeric ranking and the following criteria:

1. Tools for which ADS has already made significant investments in BI asset

development (MicroStrategy, Tableau, Microsoft, SAS, and Oracle)

2. New tools that were highly ranked in the Gartner MQ (Clear Story Data,

TIBCO Software, Logi Analytics, Birst, Pyramid Analytics, and Information

Builders)

3. Substantial enterprise platform market presence (Qlik)

We selected 6 finalist to conduct an in-person demonstration of their

capabilities.

MicroStrategy ClearStory Data TIBCO Software

Tableau Microsoft Qlik

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Vendor Demo

• One hour to execute a standard demo script demonstrating steps from

raw data ingestion to final output

✓ Connect to Northwind Database

✓ Create a sales report dashboard

- KPI value with trend, Vertical bar chart, Global Map, Data Table

✓ Share report

✓ End user view report

✓ Schedule refresh/email distribution

✓ View on mobile device

✓ Answer a business question

✓ Ad-hoc question

• Free form deep dive highlighting unique capabilities of their platform

• Non-functional requirements, licensing and user models, training,

support, administration, and infrastructure

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Demo Scorecard

• During the demonstration, every sub-committee member completed a

scorecard for each vendor (1-10) on the below summary categories

• Detailed interview use case requirements, aligned to critical capabilities,

collapsed into 8 summary categories

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Final Vendor Scorecard

• Following the vendor demonstration, the group met to agree upon a final

score in each category for the vendor, delegates voted on score

• Based on the clustering of scorecard results, the sub-committee narrowed

down the list to 3 vendors, MicroStrategy, Qlik, and Tibco

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5 year TCO

Entered into detailed pricing negotiations with the 3 vendors to calculate a 5

year TCO.

Overall score weighted 60% functionality score and 40% cost score.

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Scoring Results

• Matrixed Functionality scorecard and 5 Year TCO

• Selected Qlik to conduct a POC, hands-on in our environment with our

data

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Proof of Concept Approach

• Install vendor software in our environment

• Document test cases

• Vendor conduct training with users

• Connect vendor solution to required data sources

• Business users execute test cases

• Show stopper failures determined if additional POC necessary

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Example Test Case

Scorecard

Category

Reporting

Scorecard Item Schedule with data event triggers

Use Case Schedule/distribute daily field reporting

Functionality

Requirement

Ability to send internal and external email subscriptions

and export to Excel/PDF

Criticality Critical, Useful, Nice to Have

Ease Easier, Same, More Difficult

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Results

• Integration between Qlik Sense and N-Printing was insufficient to accomplish

governed self-service requirement

• Executed 2nd POC with MicroStrategy

➢ Governance through schema layer

➢ Dossier

➢ Collaboration

➢ Promote Dossier to Document

➢ Fine grained security controls allow for governance lifecycle (personal,

community, enterprise)

➢ Mobile capabilities including white label, responsive design, embedding

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Final Recommendation

Technology Process People

Infrastructure design Contract Roles and

responsibilities

Build Center of Excellence Change management

Software install and

configuration

Communication plan User adoption

Metadata upgrade Define policies User groups

User security setup Training curriculum Training

MicroStrategy was selected due to it’s ability to accomplish all of our POC

test cases, and provided an effective platform to implement a governed

self-service model.

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Five key takeaways

• Structured process (transparent, fair, leverage industry knowledge)

• Include all stakeholders (especially vocal critics)

• Interview the business (clearly defined requirements, scorecard)

• Define scripted vendor demonstration (compare/contrast build effort,

consumption experience)

• Conduct POCs in your environment (real business data and real use cases)

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Questions?

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