Implementation

DecisionPath offers a full complement of BI and DW professional services – all aimed at helping to ensure the success and reduce the risk of your BI/DW initiatives. When it comes time to design, develop, and deploy your BI/DW environment and BI applications, DecisionPath can assist you in flexible ways that best leverage your capabilities at a given point in time. For example, we are sometimes engaged to do the design work and to provide technical oversight and mentorship to a development team fielded by your organization. In other cases, we have been called upon to do an initial turnkey design and development effort while providing for knowledge transfer to our clients’ development teams so that they can design and develop subsequent releases. In still other cases, we have been engaged to design and develop multiple releases. In all cases, we bring our knowledge of “big-data” challenges and our experience meeting those challenges.

Our partnership for BI and DW implementation often starts with educating your BI team about our BI Pathway Method. The Implementation Phase of the BI Pathway Method uses industry best practice approaches to iterative, incremental technical delivery. Additionally, it applies analytical and design rigor to ensure a full understanding of requirements and the “value proposition” associated with a BI release, including:

• Explicitly documenting Detailed Requirements to make the “business case” so that expectations regarding the value of a BI release are communicated to and agreed to by business stakeholders. This documentation discusses the shortcomings of the “as-is” business process/information and discusses how BI can be inserted into a “to-be” business process to improve business performance. In line with industry best practices, it utilizes business questions as detailed requirements and prioritizes these questions to ensure that the most important questions are answered within a time-boxed BI release.
• Reviewing Logical Models of the data mart release with the business users, translating the contents of the model into standard business language. This ensures that as much analysis and design rigor goes into the release “on paper” before any development begins
• Prototyping the data mart release with production data to “productize” the requirements and ensure that expectations are aligned before full development begins. This gives business users the ability to see their questions answered with production data, and to validate the value of answering these questions before the investment is made to develop the release. It also provides insight into source data quality issues which might need to be addressed while development is in progress.
• Instituting Business Process Reengineering activities to implement the “to be” process/information and to ensure that the potential business value associated with a BI release is fully captured.

More broadly, the Implementation Phase consists of an integrated series of activities that produce specific deliverables which feed or complement subsequent activities and deliverables, resulting in BI releases that deliver specific business value to your organization. As with all aspects of the BI Pathway Method, we can tailor our approach to your specific environment. For example, if your organization already has a BI/DW development method, we can work with you to adapt the Implementation Phase activities or to refine your development method. We can also adapt the best practices technical approach to your specific IT organizational structure. Ultimately, we want to bring our expertise to bear in the way that is best suited to meeting your organizational goals for leveraging BI to drive business performance.