Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence Strategy Assessments  

Readiness Assessment and Strategy Prioritization projects are appropriate both for organizations embarking on their initial data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) effort and those with a mature DW/BI environment.  If this is your initial foray into data warehousing and business intelligence, you want to start off on the right foot. Our team participates in the early planning stages to evaluate your organization’s readiness to launch a DW/BI initiative and develop an effective strategy for moving forward. We work with management to identify a high-priority, manageable initial scope, develop justification, and establish a roadmap for subsequent phases. The readiness deliverable summarizes our findings and specific recommendations.  

If you have a mature DW/BI environment, an assessment engagement will identify opportunities to grow and enhance your capabilities. Our team will work with your organization to evaluate your current environment, assess your methodology and strategy, and ensure your organization’s DW/BI capabilities align with the business’s strategies and requirements. Our goal is to formulate a business-driven plan for on-going investments in your DW/BI environment. The assessment analysis will identify critical gaps, needs and recommended actions.

Regardless of the maturity of your DW/BI environment, the goals and objectives for an assessment/strategy project include:

• • Understand the high priority business requirements surrounding the organization’s reporting and analytic needs.
  • Conduct a high level review of the data architecture to determine its suitability for supporting the identified requirements.
  • Derive a roadmap based on the data realities and business priorities to assure the DW/BI environment will meet the organization’s ongoing and future reporting and analytic needs.

Assessment/strategy projects typically include the following activities:

• • Interview key business and IT sponsors and stakeholders.
  • Analyze critical business requirements, executive commitment, and fundamental technical issues.
  • Facilitate a management session to review findings, reach consensus on priorities, and secure commitment to a roadmap.
  • Recommend an overall strategy for delivering enhanced DW/BI capabilities, including overall methodology, project scope, and data architecture.

Business Requirements 

Aligning the data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) environment with the business’s requirements is absolutely critical to a successful initiative. Period. Best-of-breed tools or sophisticated designs won’t salvage a DW/BI project that fails to focus on the business. The business’s requirements impact almost every decision made during the course of a DW/BI implementation.

Our methodology is business focused. The team will interview key business management and knowledge workers to understand their business objectives, analytic requirements and associated potential business impact, and project success criteria. In addition, we conduct data discovery interviews with IT representatives knowledgeable about the key source systems to ensure that appropriate, feasible boundaries are established early in the process. Upon completion of the interview process, the consultant assimilates and analyzes the interview results. The findings are then presented to the appropriate stakeholders to validate the results, ensure consensus on the vision, and establish future priorities.

The requirements deliverable typically covers the following topics: critical business and analytic requirements, feasibility of existing systems and data to support the capabilities required, preliminary data warehouse bus architecture with common business dimensions, initial project success criteria, and key issues/risks with tactical and strategic recommendations.

Data Modeling 

The goal of a data warehouse and business intelligence (DW/BI) solution is to publish the “right” data and make it easily accessible to decision-makers. Successful DW/BI implementations rest on the foundation of a dimensional model to deliver both ease-of-use and query performance.  Effective dimensional models reflect the natural performance measurements and descriptive attributes of a business. They survive reorganizations, acquisitions, and other business changes, if designed properly. Most importantly, business partners will find a well-designed dimensional model intuitive because it mirrors the way they think about the business, not the way a data modeler has normalized the organization’s data. Dimensional models are critical to enabling the business to leverage the organization’s valuable information assets.

Our team often engages in a Dimensional Model Design project immediately following a Business Requirements effort. In other cases, the client may have independently completed the requirements analysis process. The consultants work closely with key business liaisons and IT professionals to facilitate the design of flexible dimensional models through a series of joint design workshops. The process results in a design specification describing the fact and dimension tables and associated columns, along with sample values, slowly changing dimension policies, and required business rules transformations, where appropriate. The resulting logical data model is the starting point for the physical design, source to target mapping, and ETL efforts that will follow. The model will be independent of database platform and/or tool idiosyncrasies.

Design Strategy and Reviews  

Some organizations have already invested a significant effort into gathering requirements and developing a preliminary schema, but require additional guidance before completing and implementing the model. You can leverage our expert level consultants experience by engaging us in an onsite or remote design review to identify any gaps in your strategy and allow us to make targeted recommendations on areas that may need additional analysis.

Typically, our consultant will make a two-day onsite visit. Prior to the onsite visit, the consultant will review background documentation such as the project charter and scope, business requirements, and existing schema. In addition, we ask the client to provide a list of questions; issues and/or concerns related to the dimensional data models. During the onsite visit, the consultant will facilitate discussion of the client’s modeling questions and issues and provide feedback regarding our review of the dimensional models.

While each client engagement is different, topics may include dimensional modeling best practices, identified design issues, client identified design issues, tradeoffs of alternative design options, and data warehouse architecture alternatives.  Most clients take detailed notes during the onsite visit and develop written documentation summarizing the key lessons learned and recommendations resulting from the design review. We will then review and comment on this summary document. Often times we are asked to provide executive level presentations to objectively and independently suggest the proper roadmap to proceed with the engagement.  This may include suggestions on where additional consulting assistance may be warranted to sure up the client’s existing staff.

Data Marts

On many occasions, you do not need an enterprise data warehouse – just a specific business intelligence solution to address a specific business problem. Multi dimensional Online Analytic processing or MOLAP, based data mart solutions facilitate rapid delivery of such solutions. The source data for such data marts can come from an enterprise data warehouse, if there is one, or from the relational databases of the source systems.

MOLAP, while powerful, suffers from lack of standard design techniques. A build process would therefore involve trial and error, leading to inefficiencies, inflexible implementations and time and cost overruns. Peak Performance Technologies has developed a set of design templates that allow walkthroughs with users, reducing the number of design iterations involved and eliminating some of these inefficiencies and reducing time to deployment.

Management Dashboards

Dashboards need to go beyond the glitz and deliver real value. Aggregating the right information, formulating the right Key Performance Indicators and delivering it in the most appropriate format and frequency are all key design issues. Our experience in BI goes to work for you to achieve a really useful dashboard rather than a merely cosmetically appealing one. We will work with your functional users and the management team to identify the data points you need and help you learn how to create dashboards that are effective to all areas of the organization.  The most recent version of PeopleTools (8.54) has provided robust “Work Centers” that our clients’ are rolling out across the organization.  These are dashboards that pull data from the various tables/records and fields throughout the PeopleSoft suite of products and display the data in customizable formats that end users can understand and leverage to enhance their day-to-day job duties.