To Centralize or Decentralize:

That is the Question!

Brian Treu Gary George
Intuit Business Intelligence Director Consumer Group IT – Business Intelligence
Intuit Intuit

TDWI Executive Summit

August 16, 2010
Agenda
• Introduction
• Intuit’s BI Evolution
• Distributed Development Initiative
– Technical Architecture
– Social Architecture
– Challenges
– Success Measures
• Q&A

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Intuit at a Glance
A Leading Provider of Business and Financial
Management Solutions

• Founded in 1983
• FY 2009 revenue of $3.1 billion
• Traded on the Nasdaq: INTU
• Employs more than 7,800 people
• Offices across the U.S., Canada, India and U.K.
• Nearly 50 million people use our QuickBooks, Payroll,
Payments, TurboTax, financial institution solutions and
Quicken products and services
• Fortune top 100 places to work
Fortune Top 100 Places to Work

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 Proven formula: what we do matters…

Improving

Help families find $1,000

40M
Lives Help small businesses be 20% more
annually… $400M in consumer profitable… Customers revenues ~20%
savings of U.S. GDP, pay 1 in 12 American
workers

Help people get the maximum

tax refund… $33B in tax Improve FI profit per customer by Help accountants be 20% more
refunds, 20%… IB customers equal to productive today… Serve half of
1 out of every 3 the 5 largest U.S. bank
th
all accounting firms
tax returns e-filed
Considerations to the Case

Organization BI Maturity
Budget Objectives
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Introduction:
• Collection of different business models
• BI resources in each business and functional group

BI
resources
QuickBooks Payroll TurboTax ProTax Homestead Dig Insight …
Prod Dev
Marketing
Sales
Fulfillment
Prod Support
Finance
HR
IT

• BI technology
– Oracle, Informatica, Business Objects, Hyperion P&A

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Intuit’s BI Evolution
1990s 2000-2007
Local data warehouses, spreadmarts in each BU Fully centralized enterprise data warehouses
BU 1 BU 2 BU 3 BU 4 BU 1 BU 2 BU 3 BU 4

Reports Reports Reports Reports Reports Reports Reports Reports

Data Data Spread Spread

Whs 1 Whs 2 Mart 1 Mart 2
Enterprise DWs

Benefits:
• Rapid deployment
• Local control over priorities, resources
• Customization meets high % of requirements
Challenges:
• Duplication of effort across BUs
• Redundant costs (HW, SW, support staff)
• Silo mentality, lack of comm across Bus
• Data integration difficult without scalable
environment
Benefits:
• Reduce data redundancy
• Promotes communication between BUs
• Resource efficiency (HW, SW, FTEs)
Challenges:
• BUs compete over centralized DW resources
• “One size fits all” solution meets lower % of
business requirements for each BU
• Data integration difficult due to limited
resources

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What Really Happened?
• Intuit pursued a hybrid approach.
• Business Units kept Business Intelligence resources but the
Infrastructure was centralized and opened up.
• The Enterprise Data Warehouse environments allow for
distributed development.

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Intuit’s BI Evolution
2008+ • Hybrid model leverages benefits of
Enterprise DW foundation with both centralized & decentralized
context-specific flexibility
models
BU 1 BU 2 BU 3 BU 4
• Challenges from both models still
Reports Reports Reports Reports exist to a lesser degree…but
consciously accepted given the
benefits
• Crucial focus on easier data
integration to support growth of
Ent Ent BU BU BU
DM 1 DM 1 DM 1 DM 1 DM 1 various businesses
Enterprise BU-owned Data Marts
Data Marts BU-specific data, filters, biz rules

DW Foundation
ODS tables, shared dimensions

Enterprise DW

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 Distributed Development Initiative
Dramatically increase the velocity, success, and business
alignment of new Business Intelligence capabilities
How:
Federate BI solution development and information delivery by creating:
• The Enabling Technical Infrastructure
• Governance and Operating Mechanisms
• Standards
• Social Architecture
…to maintain needed control over data access and consistency of data
interpretation while enabling large scale data integration and leveraging the
numerous and highly skilled BI resources throughout the enterprise.
Why:
– The velocity of demand for BI solutions is increasing
– Industry wide, the BI community has learned that the path to durable and large
scale success of BI programs involves striking a balance between
centralization and decentralization

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 Technical Architecture

BI “Building Blocks” ... Infrastructure As A Service

Data Integration &

Distributed Development
Oracle 10g / RAC

Hyperion
Planning
Environment

Architecture
ERP Partner
(Real Application Clusters)
Partner
Workspace Workspace – Performance insulation
Enterprise Level

Building Blocks
De-normalized
Intuit ODS

Partner Partner – Scalability – “Pay as you

Business
Objects
Workspace Workspace
CRM grow”
Partner Partner
Workspace Workspace – Transparent Failover
Other Enterprise Partner Partner
Workspace
Clearly Defined
Sources Workspace
(~30) Partner Workspaces

Others
Brio,
SAS,
Enterprise Data Marts – BU “IT” teams are
allocated space for
development

IIT BU IT

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Business Impact
• Distributed development model
– Can utilize centralized model where high rigor is needed
• “Traditional IT” solution
– Can utilize decentralized model when high flexibility is needed
• Rapid deployment, agile/iterative development
• More accurate solutions
• Control over priorities relevant to their area and reduced competition
over centralized resources
• Technical architecture
– Timely information due to…
• Resource isolation
• Scalability of hardware to meet performance needs
– Data integration possibilities…
• Various data sources can be linked more easily for enhanced insight

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Social Architecture = Community
• Develop, support, & enable community of developers
– Share best practices
– Implement operating standards
– Establish communication channels
– Provide transparency into work of different BUs
– Leverage synergy and combined intelligence of community
networks
– Standardize BI career paths
– Create skill development opportunities
– Enable career mobility

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 Data Warehouse Roles Distribution
Distributed in Business Units (Users)
Distributed in IT Liaison Teams (Developers & Business Analyst)

Centralized in BI IT Team (Technical Experts)

Vendor & Infrastructure Governance Enterprise and
License Functional
Management Data Mart
Development

Business Unit
Data Mart
Development

Business Requirements
Expertise

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Challenges
• Mindset Shift
– For primarily fringe groups, the mindset shift required more effort
and discussions on defining for them how the concept works
– Defining “requirements” for involvement of Developers in the
Social Architecture
– Responsibility, accountability
• Adherence to Security Policy
– Visibility into data content for those areas developed by the
business
– Avoiding PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data contained
in the Partner Workspaces
• Skill Set Requirements
– For maintaining an effective & efficient environment, processes to
make certain developer skills met a minimum level expectation

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Measures of Success
• Voice of the Customer (internal)
– Rapid deployment of solutions, flexibility of the environment
– “I have the tools and information to do my job”
– Data integration enables new capabilities
– Vibrant “community” and access to knowledge/experience
• Reduction in “silos” of BU data repositories
– Successful reduction in “silo” platforms created by the business /
to support the business
• Reduction in overall tool catalog
– By identifying the enterprise “Tool Box”, a reduction in fringe tools
requiring specialized skills

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How is it going? Distributed Team POV
Platforms and capabilities are world class without
worrying about infrastructure
Options for solutions and resources
Standards help flexibility and mobility
Can still move at the BU speed

Limitations on access and functionality compared

to central team
Limited input to architecture

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How is it going? Central Team POV
Standards create consistency and efficiency
Enterprise view of demand for solutions
Reduces risk of one off “shadow” solutions

Role of enforcer to police adherence to

standards and best practices
Change management requires end-to-end
transparency and collaboration
Challenges aligning SDLC processes

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What’s Next

• Centralization of Enterprise Systems

– Creates a common landscape for business infrastructure systems
across the BUs, e.g. CRM, ERP
– Creates consistency in business process and data definitions
• Vendor consolidation creates opportunities for end-to-end
investment
– OTB capabilities minimize the total cost of ownership to delivery
BI and increases commonality.
• Broad access to Higher Performance Systems
– Processing Clickstream and Transactional Data

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Questions?

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Contact Information
• If you have further questions or comments:

Gary George
Consumer Group IT – Business Intelligence
Intuit
Gary_George@Intuit.com

Brian Treu
Business Intelligence Director
Intuit
Brian_Treu@Intuit.com

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