Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Performance Management Consultants

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Understanding how the BI Pathway Method works is a first step. If you want a detailed understanding of how you can leverage the BI Pathway to meet business objectives across your entire enterprise, please take part in one of our educational offerings.

For more information about the services offered as part of the BI Pathway Method, please see our Custom Consulting Services Catalog or contact us for a preliminary conversation.

I. Roadmap Phase
During the roadmap phase, our consultants work with your business and IT people to identify the key business challenges that can be solved through business intelligence and analytics, determine your company’s barriers to success, and chart a course forward to create targeted business impacts.

A. Creating a BI Strategy
DecisionPath works with your business and IT communities to create a compelling and pragmatic business case for leveraging BI for such purposes as reducing costs, acquiring and retaining profitable customers, achieving operational excellence, increasing campaign effectiveness, meeting regulatory mandates, delivering more robust management and financial information, improving strategic performance, and driving top-line growth.

Key Benefit: focus business and IT communities’ attention on high-impact business improvement opportunities

B. Assessing Risk
DecisionPath uses our BI Readiness Assessment framework to benchmark your company’s BI and analytics capabilities against best practices and in relation to the specific BI opportunities captured in your BI strategy. We typically look at:

business alignment – are the business intelligence program goals supportive of business strategy execution, will BI create business value, are program risks acceptable, and are stakeholder expectations realistic?
governance what is the nature and extent of executive sponsorship, are their BI governance processes in place, and are the roles and responsibilities of the business and IT people involved with the BI program clearly articulated and understood?
delivery readiness – is the BI/IT organizational structure appropriate, are the right skillsets and resources available, is the technical infrastructure suitable, is an appropriate BI lifecycle method being used, and are there appropriate processes for managing data quality?
business readiness – what are the attitudes and skillsets of various potential business users of BI and analytics, what is their willingness and readiness to adopt fact-based business management approaches, and what is the willingness to change targeted business processes to improve business results?

Key Benefit: increases organizational readiness and likelihood of project success

C. Develop BI Roadmap
Once a strategy and its associated risks have been vetted and approved, we work with clients to build out a comprehensive plan to guide the BI and analytics initiative over a 3 to 5 year period. Essentially, we sequence development and deployment of BI and analytic applications, while also planning for development and deployment of technical infrastructure and management of organizational and business process changes.

Key Benefit: creates a detailed, structured and prioritized set of activities (projects) that move your company forward to leverage BI and analytics to drive profits and performance.

II. Delivery Phase
The delivery phase of the BI Pathway is made up of a series of incremental projects based on the prioritized BI opportunities developed in the roadmap phase. This incremental approach allows clients to be agile – delivering near term results, while also being systematic with a commitment to the overall quality of your business intelligence program. Our approach combines our business-driven design methods with best practices technical methods that have proven through years of industry experience.

A. Design & Prototype
During design and prototyping, we work with business users to refine the detailed BI requirements identified during the Roadmap Phase. These configuration-controlled requirements allow for end-to-end traceability between what business users said they need and what the BI team builds and delivers. Well-structured requirements help our clients manage both business and IT expectations, creating the ability to make practical tradeoffs of scope, time, costs, and business impact. BI requirements are also crucial for developing logical architectures and data models to guide development of BI and analytic applications. Using the appropriate data models in conjunction with your company’s user profiles, usage scenarios and BI delivery methods, we then develop and refine high-impact application prototypes that enable business users to test drive the BI or analytic application prior to full-scale development
Key Benefit: develops design and prototype in conjunction with IT and business users to increase likelihood of meeting business users requirements.

B. Develop, Deploy & Support
During this phase, the benefits of thoughtful planning and design pay off with the development, deployment and support of truly customized and high-impact business intelligence and/or analytic applications. DecisionPath’s deep domain knowledge and technical expertise helps to ensure that you are using the right data models, ETL processes, data quality routines, and BI delivery methods to meet your users’ business objectives. Our experience working with most of the major BI and data warehousing technologies and tools allows us work in your technical environment – and to help you select tools (if needed) based on your actual needs rather than on a features-and functions bakeoff. The BI Pathway Method is highly rated by The Data Warehousing Institute based on its incorporation of best practices technical methods across the development, testing, and deployment lifecycle. Additionally, with our experience working with both business and IT roles, we’re able to provide the right level of training and support to meet your business needs.
Key Benefit: provides customized BI and analytic applications specifically tailored to your business needs

C. Achieve Business Impact
The journey towards world-class business intelligence doesn’t stop once we’ve designed, developed and deployed your BI applications. Our senior BI consultants are adept at business process modeling and process improvement, and the BI Pathway Method contains a BI Impact module that can be used to design a business process from scratch or improve an existing business process.

In addition to process management, we also monitor and measure BI success in terms of user adoption and system technical performance. In this phase, we’re also able to identify new opportunities and new targets for improving the business impact of your business intelligence program.

Steps to the BI Pathway Method