Posted by Mark Brousseau
Business and IT collaboration is critical to the success of a data warehousing project, Alison Torres, director, Teradata Warehouse Consulting told attendees during a presentation at the FTA Technology Conference and Exposition at the Grand Hyatt Buckhead in Atlanta. “The most successful data warehouses have a team of IT and business representatives with an executive sponsor,” Torres said.
A data warehouse is a place that brings together data from disparate systems, which enables timely, accurate decision-making in support of strategic and tactical business initiatives, Torres explained.
“The only relevant measures of data warehousing success are business impact and value,” she added.
Torres said the keys to business and IT working together on a data warehousing project are:
… Building/evolving the vision together
… Appreciating IT’s challenges
… Building the business/data model together
… Championing the data warehouse together
… Creating overlapping organizations
… Establishing meaningful accountabilities and service level agreements
So how do you get started? Torres offered several suggestions:
… Assemble a cross-functional team with representation across all business units, corporate departments and IT services
… Hold weekly business data modeling sessions
… Develop consistent business definitions across all levels of the business
… Map data requirements generated from business modeling sessions
… Store the data model in a tool
… Produce detailed documentation
Additionally, IT must understand the business impact of data problems, Torres said.
“When data is unavailable, business opportunities are lost, perhaps forever,” Torres explained. “Late information is, in most cases, as good as no information. It is imperative that IT understands this.”
It’s through this type of collaboration that organizations can increase the odds of success of their data warehouse project.
What do you think?
Showing posts with label data warehouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data warehouse. Show all posts
Monday, August 2, 2010
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Business Intelligence at SSA
By Mark Brousseau
Business intelligence has transformed the way the Social Security Administration (SSA) does business, John Simermeyer, associate commissioner, Office of Earnings, Enumeration and Administrative Services, for the SSA said yesterday during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in Washington, D.C.
“Our business intelligence efforts are an integral component of the agency’s planning process,” Simermeyer told attendees. “Business intelligence empowers SSA to accomplish our mission.”
Each year, SSA issues more than 18 million Social Security cards, posts $4 trillion in earnings to worker records, processes over 23 million status-changes, pays out more than $650 billion, and fulfills more than 1 billion requests for Social Security Number verification from other agencies and organizations).
The challenge for SSA is that its workload is increasing as its staff is decreasing. “The retirement rate has hit SSA very hard,” Simermeyer explained. “Retiring baby boomers are driving up the workload at SSA. At the same time, we are losing many of our knowledge workers to the same phenomenon.”
SSA also was challenged by information silos across the organization. “We have many legacy systems dispersed throughout the agency,” Simermeyer said. “This creates problems in terms of cost and data reconciliation. We spent a lot of unnecessary effort trying to find out why numbers don’t match.”
To help with its mission, SSA deployed its SSA Unified Measurement System (SUMS) to provide critical information across its workflows and systems. “It’s all about the data, and that was perhaps our greatest challenge,” Simermeyer said, recalling SSA’s inflexible reports and lack of infrastructure across the organization. “So, we created a business intelligence repository and focused on data integration.”
Business intelligence helps “inform SSA’s strategic decisions affecting American taxpayers,” he said.
“We are using business intelligence to transform data to information to knowledge to action, and it’s having a positive impact on our business outcomes,” he said. “We’ve improved decision-making and transparency, and drastically reduced the amount of data reconciliation efforts we go through.” He noted that with business intelligence, SSA has gone from multiple sources of data to a single source.
Simermeyer said that business intelligence also, “improved the timeliness, accuracy and measurement of work. Prior to business intelligence adoption, we were reactive by nature. Now we are proactive.”
So what’s next for SSA’s business intelligence initiatives? Simermeyer said the agency plans to integrate its remaining work into the system to retire legacy systems and enhance its information infrastructure.
Business intelligence has transformed the way the Social Security Administration (SSA) does business, John Simermeyer, associate commissioner, Office of Earnings, Enumeration and Administrative Services, for the SSA said yesterday during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in Washington, D.C.
“Our business intelligence efforts are an integral component of the agency’s planning process,” Simermeyer told attendees. “Business intelligence empowers SSA to accomplish our mission.”
Each year, SSA issues more than 18 million Social Security cards, posts $4 trillion in earnings to worker records, processes over 23 million status-changes, pays out more than $650 billion, and fulfills more than 1 billion requests for Social Security Number verification from other agencies and organizations).
The challenge for SSA is that its workload is increasing as its staff is decreasing. “The retirement rate has hit SSA very hard,” Simermeyer explained. “Retiring baby boomers are driving up the workload at SSA. At the same time, we are losing many of our knowledge workers to the same phenomenon.”
SSA also was challenged by information silos across the organization. “We have many legacy systems dispersed throughout the agency,” Simermeyer said. “This creates problems in terms of cost and data reconciliation. We spent a lot of unnecessary effort trying to find out why numbers don’t match.”
To help with its mission, SSA deployed its SSA Unified Measurement System (SUMS) to provide critical information across its workflows and systems. “It’s all about the data, and that was perhaps our greatest challenge,” Simermeyer said, recalling SSA’s inflexible reports and lack of infrastructure across the organization. “So, we created a business intelligence repository and focused on data integration.”
Business intelligence helps “inform SSA’s strategic decisions affecting American taxpayers,” he said.
“We are using business intelligence to transform data to information to knowledge to action, and it’s having a positive impact on our business outcomes,” he said. “We’ve improved decision-making and transparency, and drastically reduced the amount of data reconciliation efforts we go through.” He noted that with business intelligence, SSA has gone from multiple sources of data to a single source.
Simermeyer said that business intelligence also, “improved the timeliness, accuracy and measurement of work. Prior to business intelligence adoption, we were reactive by nature. Now we are proactive.”
So what’s next for SSA’s business intelligence initiatives? Simermeyer said the agency plans to integrate its remaining work into the system to retire legacy systems and enhance its information infrastructure.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
How BI Should Work
By Mark Brousseau
Kevin Quinn, vice president of product marketing at Information Builders (www.informationbuilders.com), says that there are three levels of business intelligence: strategic, analytical and operational.
The strategic level helps companies monitor performance and communicate strategy. The analytical level isolates information to identify the good and the bad and provide historical trends, as well as forecasts. And the operational level helps automate and accelerate business processes.
These three levels of business work in conjunction with one another to drive business improvements. The trouble is that most organizations implement them as completely separate initiatives, Quinn said today during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in Washington, D.C.
For instance, many organizations implement performance management and scorecards at the highest level of the organization, but never bring them down, Quinn said. In fact, Quinn cited a survey showing that most organizations have deployed business intelligence capabilities to fewer than 20 percent of their internal users. That’s a problem since 80 percent of the world’s data resides outside of the data warehouse, Quinn said. “This means that there is no direction at the middle levels of the company. People have to shoot blind and hope for the best,” he said. “Operations will never know if it is working on the right things if it isn’t getting direction from analytical business intelligence.”
“This isn’t how business intelligence should work,” Quinn said. “Companies are neglecting what they can do at the bottom levels of their organizations or the front lines, which is where they can get the highest return on investment. It’s only when you take action at the operational level that you get the largest benefits. Companies should have the three levels of business intelligence work together.”
What do you think? Post your comments below.
Kevin Quinn, vice president of product marketing at Information Builders (www.informationbuilders.com), says that there are three levels of business intelligence: strategic, analytical and operational.
The strategic level helps companies monitor performance and communicate strategy. The analytical level isolates information to identify the good and the bad and provide historical trends, as well as forecasts. And the operational level helps automate and accelerate business processes.
These three levels of business work in conjunction with one another to drive business improvements. The trouble is that most organizations implement them as completely separate initiatives, Quinn said today during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in Washington, D.C.
For instance, many organizations implement performance management and scorecards at the highest level of the organization, but never bring them down, Quinn said. In fact, Quinn cited a survey showing that most organizations have deployed business intelligence capabilities to fewer than 20 percent of their internal users. That’s a problem since 80 percent of the world’s data resides outside of the data warehouse, Quinn said. “This means that there is no direction at the middle levels of the company. People have to shoot blind and hope for the best,” he said. “Operations will never know if it is working on the right things if it isn’t getting direction from analytical business intelligence.”
“This isn’t how business intelligence should work,” Quinn said. “Companies are neglecting what they can do at the bottom levels of their organizations or the front lines, which is where they can get the highest return on investment. It’s only when you take action at the operational level that you get the largest benefits. Companies should have the three levels of business intelligence work together.”
What do you think? Post your comments below.
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