booklet - ER 2011

MoreBI Keynote 1: Modeling management information
Arthur Overlack (Altran)
Date: Monday 11:00-12:30
Room: Louise 1b
Chair: Ivan Jureta (Université de Namur, Belgium)
Workshop Keynote Abstracts
Arthur Overlack After his university degree in Aerospace Technology Mr. Overlack worked in the
Aircraft Industry for 8 years in materials management, after sales support and Marketing (Fokker
50). After 4 years of HR consulting with Mercury Urval, he joined Cap Gemini, working with
clients in many industries and (semi-)government. Assignments varied from Business Intelligence
consultancy to large scale change management and strategy development in banking , insurance,
industry and trade.
Mr. Overlack joined Altran in 2005 and is now responsible for development of (Group) Solutions and deployment
in the Netherlands. At Altran Group level he is Global Practice Manager for BI, responsible for managing and
supporting the development and deployment of BI solutions by Altran in Europe.
Throughout his career, Business Intelligence has been a recurring subject. Since the emergence of Windowsbased
BI systems and maturing Data Warehouse tools, technology became less important and more focus was
needed on developing requirements for BI systems. The quest for the nature of management and in particular
the contents and character of management information led to the development of the Business Control Matrix,
as a means to translate management notions about control mechanisms into data-structures that would yield
effective management information.
Abstract Hundreds of models have been designed in the past to represent management processes, most of
them dedicated to a specific aspect to be managed. To model management information is difficult, since there
is a gap between managerial thinking and the way relevant data are to be identified, stored, retrieved and
assembled to make information.
The essence of the problem is to find a way to represent manager’s needs, allowing managers to validate
the correctness and completeness, while allowing IT staff to use it as an unambiguous input to build a data
warehouse and customize a presentation tool, of which there are many in the market.
The method to model management information needs, must be verifiable and easy, to realize a short leadtime
and to generate and strong commitment of future users, to facilitate adoption of the system to be built.
Also, it must allow adaptation in consecutive periods of adjustment, if new insights lead to extension of the
management information requirements.
The method of the BCM aims to provide a relatively simple method to bridge the gap between the way
managers think, using systems theory and the way IT specialists deal with data warehouse design. Also some
other features of the BCM allow cross-checking the consistency of management mechanisms across boundaries
in the organization and verification of the consistency of data- and dimension definitions.
The method is meant to be transferred to the standing organizations, in order to enable them to expand and
improve their model continuously.
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