Business Requirement Templates

When it comes to digital analytics implementations, one of the critical steps is requirements definition. It is important to identify what business questions you want to answer via your investment in digital analytics. Without clearly defined goals and business questions, you are simply collecting data and hoping that you can answer questions as they arise.

Unfortunately, many organizations skip this critical step and jump right into analytics tagging. In most cases, skipping requirements gathering isn’t done maliciously. It is simply too much work to identify the business questions stakeholders need, especially when many of them aren’t analytics experts and don’t know what questions are even possible to answer!

To help with this, the Apollo analytics management system provides hundreds of proven business questions that you can choose from to simplify the requirements definition process. These business questions can be filtered by industry vertical or by the features present within your digital property.

Our Apollo customers have found that pre-selecting a list of business requirements and sharing them with their stakeholders is a great way to get everyone on the same page. Getting agreement up front on what will be implemented greatly reduces the risk that stakeholders will complain that the analytics team isn’t delivering what is needed after the implementation is complete.

However, we recognize that reviewing a list of hundreds of business requirements can be tedious, especially if you have many digital properties. We also know that many organizations struggle to get their different brands or geographies to have consistent implementations. The more consistent your implementation is, the more you can aggregate data and build re-usable deliverables, such as dashboards, QA tests and code.

To help streamline the requirements process and to promote implementation consistency, the Apollo product now includes a feature called business requirement templates. Business requirement templates are predefined collections of business requirements. These templates can be used by solution architects to narrow down the full set of requirements or by partner agencies to share sets of requirements with clients.

As seen here, business requirement templates can be scoped at the Global, Agency, or Organization level.

• Global templates will be available to all Apollo customers.

• Agency templates will be available to all clients of the agency, but keep in mind that templates will only be visible to clients of the agency that created the template (since we have many agencies using Apollo!).

• Organizational templates will be available to any Apollo property within the organization.

In the example shown here, any Apollo user could select the “Apollo Retail Implementation” template and see a set of business requirements that the Apollo team thinks make sense for retail clients. If Adobe Consulting Services were an Apollo agency partner, they could create templates like the retail basic and advanced ones shown here and these templates would be available to any Adobe Consulting Services customer using Apollo. Within any Apollo property, the organizational templates would be available.

Regardless of the scope of the business requirements template, selecting a template will simply narrow the list of business requirements to those in the template definition. While we are still gathering feedback on who should be creating business requirement templates, our assumption is that they will be created by solution architects. Once a business requirement template is chosen, you have the option to enable some or all of the business requirements found in that template.

When viewing business requirements within the template creator, any business requirements that are scoped at the Agency, Organization, or Property level are tagged with an ‘A’, ‘O’, or ‘P’ respectively. Additionally, when you are building a business requirement template, only the Business Requirements that are available at the scope of your template are available for adding to the template. For example, if you are creating an Agency-scoped template you will not see or be able to select any Organization-scoped business requirements to add to your template.

Business Requirement Template Uses

There are a few different use cases for business requirement templates. The primary use case is to promote implementation consistency. Whether your organization has multiple digital properties, brands or geographies, leveraging business requirement templates can help ensure that these different properties are implementing similar business requirements.

Templates can be based upon vertical, type of site, geography, etc. For example, if you have websites in thirty countries and want to make sure that every country implements a bare minimum of items consistently, you can make a “Basic Tagging” template that includes the items that are mandatory for all countries. You may have some digital properties that are more advanced than others, so you can use a “basic” vs. “advanced” template accordingly.

If you are one of our Apollo agency partners, you can create a template once and make it available to all of your different Apollo customers. This is especially powerful if you have created your own agency-specific business requirements! Business requirement templates allow you to build once and re-use these requirements across multiple clients.

While business requirement templates can be comprehensive (e.g. Retail Advanced), they can also be smaller in nature. There may be cases when you want to create a template that has just a few business requirements. You can think of these as mini implementation modules.

For example, if your digital properties have video and you want to track it consistently, but don’t want to track everything Apollo has related to video tracking, you could select just 4-5 video business requirements and save that as a “Video Implementation” template. This template could then be used by any of your digital properties that contain video.

To learn more about Apollo business requirement templates and to see how they are created, check out the following demonstration video: