The Business Problem Assessment and Strategy Definition Blueprint is in many ways the most important part of the project implementation. During this phase the team solicits the information needed to align the strategic objectives of the clients corporate or divisional business units with what can be achieved from a technology perspective.

Key aspects of building the Business Problem Assessment and Strategy Definition Blueprint includes awareness setting around information management concepts, establishing the strategic business requirements, assessing the current environment and envisioning the future-state, design of the conceptual architecture and establishment of the overall programme plan:

Key Concepts in Information Management – the team is introduced to a set of technology, industry and organisational best practices to help govern the programme. This phase of the project also provides training (if required) to make sure the client team is working to a common level of understanding around the problem and potential solutions.

Strategic Business Requirements - An overall set of strategic business requirements are defined that translate into information requirements. Long-term objectives can start as company wide or departmental mission statements, and grow into actionable items over time. Short-term objectives must be tied to the key task that directly drives the business requirements. In a project, for example, these short-term objectives may become the key business drivers for each of the initial output. The Business Blueprint focuses on capturing both short-term and long-term business requirements but captures this information at the vision level. The detailed requirements are defined in later activities.

Organisational QuickScan – A set of assessment tools are used to quickly get an understanding of the organisations’ current state and help drive our the initial requirements for their envisioned future-state environment. The gap analysis between the current and future-state helps focus priorities for the early stages of the project by showing quick wins and areas of highest implementation risk.

Conceptual Architecture Definition – the Conceptual Architecture includes a number of aspects to cover information modelling, investigating and improving data quality, defining an integration layer and providing an analytical environment. Perhaps the most critical area of the Conceptual Architecture during Phase 1 is the definition of the information architecture, due to its impact on overall scope. This information architecture is defined at a conceptual level through a number of key information categories. Key information categories are substantiated by any number of "information points" that measure performance or provides a mechanism by which a decision is made. Hence, the information categories are used to obtain the high level subject category areas that will be proposed and implemented.

Data Governance Team – a team will be established to improve Data Governance issues across the programme. In this initial implementation phases this team will focuses primarily on improving areas such as Data Quality and Security. This team will be eventually be extended to become the Information Development Organisation.

High Level Delivery Plan – this approach is defined in the Blueprint and segmented into a number of iterative increments. These increments are based upon the identification and prioritisation of portions of the solution which are developed and deployed over the development life-cycle of the entire programme. Each cycle, or iteration, includes a feedback step to evaluate and possibly re-prioritize the effects of the recommended strategy, allowing for changes and improvement requests to be facilitated in the future increments.
 

Problem definition and analysis is the important phase of any development project. A good problem analysis and definition leads to a good solution.
While defining problems asking questions is a good practice to go to deep into problems this help further while designing approaches to solve the problem.

Following questions might help you get started on this stage.

1. Is there any existing reporting system which is in use?
2. What are the main problem areas of existing system?
3. Interview the existing users to understand the problems and their expectation from future Business Intelligence Solution.

Document all your findings and now sit and analyze the problem. If possible try to put your problem in diagrammatic way and create a storyboard.