Solutions > Business Intelligence & Datawarehousing

In today’s business climate, the marketplace changes quickly. Businesses must have the tools, technology, and information to enable quick and efficient adaptation to these changes. Executives must be able to:

Many organizations already have much of the data they need to achieve these goals. Unfortunately this data is often locked up in multiple, disparate information technology (IT) systems. These systems do not easily share data, or the data is inconsistent, inaccurate, or out-of-date.

If getting the answer to an important business question at your organization involves dispatching a team of people to scour multiple IT systems, databases, and spreadsheets, then a business intelligence solution may be for you.

Business Intelligence: Transforming Data into Information

“Business intelligence” refers to a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.
“Data” is essentially raw numbers, and organizations worldwide have lots of data. But data by itself is not entirely helpful.

“Information” is data in the context of business goals, customer needs, and market changes. Information—as opposed to data—can provide the guidance needed to make competitive, effective decisions that lead to greater revenue and profitability.

A business intelligence initiative can help your organization create infrastructure to transform raw data into information you can use to monitor the marketplace, make decisions, and measure company performance.

A BI initiative often takes the shape of a web-based portal, or business intelligence portal, which provides secure access for authorized individuals to view a wealth of information.

Behind-the-scenes, BI portals are supported by a suite of software applications that compile data from multiple company sources into enterprise data warehouses and data marts. The software frequently uses an extract / transform / load (ETL) tool or other enterprise integration mechanism to pull the information together and transform it. Since the data comes from multiple sources, it may be in multiple formats, such as when one IT system stores a customer’s name as two records (last name and first name) and another system which stores the name as one record (first name + last name). The ETL tool transforms the data into one consistent format, and then stores it in a data warehouse (for reference or historical data) or a data mart (for active or current data).

At DataSoftPro, we recognize that Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse (BI/DW) initiatives are among the forefront of top priorities for organizations today. For many organizations, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing are not new initiatives; but optimization and expansion of capabilities are the next area of focus.

For many organizations, a focus on BI/DW is an ongoing process to address data quality, user education, and in some cases, standardization of the existing infrastructure.

We interview key individuals and conduct group analysis to identify your business drivers and IT requirements, and understand how the system currently meets or misses business needs.
We then go off-site to analyze the data, meeting with you again approximately two weeks later with recommendations on how you can narrow the gap between current and desired IT states.

As an early adopter of technologies that help organizations analyze and incorporate business intelligence with customer relationship management tools, we understand how important an investment these initiatives are to clients, and how mission-critical the success of these initiatives is to the viability of the organization as a whole.

In many instances, DataSoftPro successfully helps organizations reengineer business processes, and we aid in measuring and incorporating imperative customer data into their strategic business decision-making.

Business-Driven IT

Business intelligence is not a product that can be installed. Instead, it’s a way of gathering, using, and storing data to promote a smarter way of doing business. DataSoftPro can assist in your business intelligence initiative, whether you’re just getting started or have a mature process in place that only needs refining.

DataSoftPro offers assessment, remediation, design, development, delivery, and integration services covering these business intelligence target areas:

• Metadata
• Data quality, data architecture, data support, and data mining
• Queries/reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, and forecasting
• Performance management indicators and executive management “dashboards” Content management
• Data warehousing tool evaluation, selection, and training
• Portals
• Content management
• Knowledge management

Integrating Data, Applications and Best Practices

In recent years, technological advancements have made significant improvements to better enable clients to gather and store data. IT frameworks have evolved in such a way that many organizations gather and store data in multiple sources. Many companies, however, lack the resources to convert this data into useful information that can be used for business decisions.

DataSoftPro’s Business Intelligence Practice specializes in helping clients navigate through their enterprise-wide IT Infrastructure, utilizing "Best Practices" to create a roadmap to realize the full benefits of their investment.

DataSoftPro has expanded its value proposition to clients by developing a successful, dedicated Business Intelligence Practice that provides clients with unsurpassed quality of technical and functional expertise.

DataSoftPro Areas of Service

Implementation

Experts from our Global Enterprise Integration Practice and our local branch office take the results of the roadmap and work with you to design, build, and launch your business intelligence initiative. This involves technology, but most importantly, it involves change management, disciplined business process re-engineering, and data governance principles.

Our consultants will conduct extract/transform/load activities, build data marts and data warehouses, and create BI interfaces and portals for your initiative. We will direct process standardization and documentation projects, issue resolution, and IT and data governance.

Our proven, disciplined processes enable us to achieve project goals on time and on budget, allowing us to focus on driving costs and delays out of the process, so we can drive quality into it. We’ll work with an eye toward measurable business results: cost containment, faster time-to-value, and minimized risk.

Support

DataSoftPro views every client engagement as a relationship, not a transaction. We work with you to ensure that your system performs as expected, providing knowledge transfer to your team members so they can address issues as they arise. By nurturing independence while promoting project success, we offer you a smooth transition to the new system, yet we’re available whenever you need our assistance.

Why DataSoftPro?

DataSoftPro has renowned subject matter experts, and demonstrates industry thought-leadership through our participation in industry groups, such as DAMA (Data Management Association), TDWI, and OMG, and through authorship of numerous articles, white papers, and books about business intelligence, data warehousing, data governance, enterprise architecture, and other prevalent IT topics.

For more information on how DataSoftPro can help you in starting or enhancing your BI/DW initiative, contact us.