Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence solutions are characterized by high volume’s of data and their visibility in a form that makes business decision making easier. Most BI implementation programs will go through the following phases of review:
- Review the basic architecture tenants as described above
- Review of BI Strategy: The process begins by developing or reviewing the warehouse strategy(if they already exist). From naming conventions to archiving policy to capacity planning, we discuss what a Business Intelligence program requires.
- Data Source and Data Quality Assessment: Data is analyzed to make an assessment of how much it needs to be cleaned and the expected accuracy of the reports is tallied against the quality of this data.
- Reporting analysis: Details of what reports need to be generated, down to the field and the source of the data for that field is then determined. Everything from report latency, data refresh rates to report layout templates are finalized using a set of priorietary templates that make collection of information a systematic process. These documents also usually act as hand-off points between onsite analysis teams and offshore delivery teams.
- ETL and Mapping: Once reporting requirements have been identified and a warehouse design proposed, the task of populating this data begins. The task of ETL involves reviewing external data sources and the cost of their import into the existing warehouse. This process is fairly methodical and leverages heavily from our Integration Practice. We view ETL as data level integration across a different toolset. Tasks involved in this phase usually deal with cleanup of data, fault tolerance, performance, data merge patterns and design extensibility considerations
- Performance and Standards review: Strong standards and rigorous education of best practices mean that our development team follows best practices in T-SQL, SSIS and SSAS design. We review our implementations several times during the development process to ensure compliance to best practices and customer warehousing standards.