August 20, 2008
The benefits of business intelligence come in saving lives for one organization

When the Los Angeles Times revealed that one of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) centers in California was turning away organs for potential transplant recipients, the agency was quick to discover the benefits of business intelligence.

Two years ago, the hospital, part of a network that facilitates all organ transplants in the United States, wasn't replacing employees who quit or retired, in the hope of saving costs. That left them without enough surgeons to perform operations.

"They didn't bother to tell [patients] that organs had been offered," said Andrea McLester, business intelligence manager with Richmond, Va.-based UNOS. "They simply said there had been no offers made."

UNOS manages the country's Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, through which data on organs and potential recipients is collected to facilitate matches. The Department of Evaluation and Quality (DEQ), a department within the UNOS organization, is supposed to catch problems like those that arose in California.

The problem was that the number of transplants performed had increased from 6,000 in 2000 to 22,000 in 2007, McLester said. But the number of allocation analysts -- people who manually review every allocation to check for anomalies and make sure distribution is fair -- remained the same: four. Meanwhile, there was a huge backlog of requests for reports from IT and the research department.

If those analysts had had better access to the network's information, they would have caught what was going on in California, McLester said.

"It really wasn't [DEQ's] fault," she said. "The demand had just grown far beyond what they could do."

What UNOS needed, McLester said, was to allow the analysts to access that data themselves. With a BI system in place, analysts could go through and see information without having to turn in a report request to IT.

"If we could [have] actually put the power to see that data and see that information in the hands of the allocation analysts, we might have been able to stop that situation," she said.

UNOS looked at Cognos, SAS, Hyperion and SAP Business Objects when trying to choose a BI vendor. UNOS has SQL Server but developed mostly its own applications to run the organization.

UNOS chose Business Objects because of its user-friendliness, McLester said. With Web Intelligence, business users could generate their own reports and access the information without having to write queries or involve IT. Also, UNOS developed the application to present analysts with only anomalies -- such as a dip in transplants in certain areas -- saving them countless hours of weeding through all the data.

"Our main goal was to put reporting in the hands of our business users," McLester said, "and we felt Web Intelligence was user-friendly enough that we could do that."

UNOS purchased the entire Business Objects stack but right now is using mostly Web Intelligence, Data Integrator and xCelsius, she said.

UNOS also had an enormous amount of data in spreadmarts, spreadsheets modified by individuals throughout the organization that each had the potential to spread inaccuracies. They were missing a big part of the picture by not having that information located in one secured source, McLester said.

"We opened up a whole [new] dimension of transplantation," she said. "For the first time, we had easy access to the histories of each center."

UNOS also realized that it needed hardware upgrades, and it is now in the process of mapping those out.

"One of the biggest things we underestimated was the amount of data we were going to be processing," McLester said.

The Business Objects tools will eventually be rolled out to between 250 and 300 people. Fifty are trained so far.

But one of the biggest threats to the implementation, which began in March 2007, wasn't finding the data or getting the hardware -- it was getting everyone on board.

Those in DEQ had been blamed for the incident, but they felt they had been asking for BI tools for many years, McLester said.

There was so much animosity that when UNOS held its first meeting on the project, representatives from DEQ didn't come.

But McLester and other IT managers got creative. They established a BI work group with members of the business side and IT to help develop requirements. A member of DEQ worked with the development team through the entire process.

"She really educated her peers on her side of the house because she saw everything the development team went through," McLester said. "It gave them a whole new insight and understanding in terms of what stresses we dealt with, and the type of information we needed from them."

It's the most important take-away from their BI project, McLester said, and a key to getting all the benefits of BI to employees.

"Involve your business users," she said. "That made all the difference in the world. In IT, we really underestimate the importance of the business user. I think they had a limited understanding of just what was possible."

By Courtney Bjorlin
SearchSAP.com