Value-Driven. Business Intelligence Strategy

Transcription

1 Value-Driven Business Intelligence Strategy The goal of business intelligence is to deliver value for your company through access to trusted answers that drive business decisions.

2 Hillstar Business Solutions believes in the value-driven business intelligence strategy. This starts with you and your company. Specifically, focusing on the questions you need to answer on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, furthering your understanding of business outcomes and strategies that will enable your company to grow. Starting with this understanding is how you can then take the first step towards implementing the value-driven business intelligence strategy. A people first strategy implies that technology should not be the first thing you really look at. Though technology is an important part to any successful business intelligence recipe, technology is not business intelligence. In fact, this is a big part of the issue that a lot of companies are faced with today. As you have noticed with your own company, tools are upgraded, added to and replaced, as your business grows. This is why implementing our strategy is a fresh way of looking at your real needs as well as working within the context of iterative and collaborative techniques for delivering on promised value. The strategy gives you a way to always look at your business intelligence goals in perspectives and layers that are easy to understand and create a framework that is as dynamic as your business.

3 In relation to being dynamic, a recent Gartner study found that 50% of your current business intelligence and analytics needs will change over the course of the next 12 months. This means that having a strategy that is built on iterative and collaborative execution will allow you to accept this reality with welcoming arms. Having this understanding helps concrete why you and your company can benefit greatly from employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy. Higher user adoption equals greater success rates in relation to your business intelligence needs.

4 When it comes to the topic of business intelligence, there is a lot of technology and terminology that people commonly use. However, when it comes to framing the real value desired from your company's data, the three perspectives of business intelligence are employed. Past Reactive reporting that commonly takes place across most companies. This is the rearview mirror looking backwards only at what took place. Present Here is where you find key performance indicators (KPI s), as well as streaming analytics for as-of-now insights. Future Within this perspective we find predictive analytics, where as a company is wanting to get out in front of specific business scenarios. When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the natural progression of activities. You track from the past perspective into the present. You improve from the present perspective into the future. You analyze the outcomes from the future perspective via the past. This model aligns more naturally with your business and it's processes. This can further be applied across your entire organization and whatever your solution footprint exists as. It allows you to easily categorize your questions and desired business outcomes as you mature as an organization, in relation to your data for making informed decisions.

5 Past Perspective What happened? Having the base understanding of how to classify your questions or business outcomes across the three perspectives, lets dive in with some examples. The first example relates to the past perspective. Here you can see that we have three attrtibutes that further define this example. Question Nature of the business question that drives modeling efforts. Purpose Nature of the action or activities that take place during answering the desired business questions. Examples Typical ways in which a consumer of the information interacts with the deliverables. Looking at the example questions for the past perspective, you can see the nature of the question come through in what happened?.

6 Present Perspective What is happening? Across the three perspectives, the same three attributes help them give greater context into the types of business questions that are modeled for each of them. You will notice that with the present perspective the nature of the question and purpose changes. Now the business questions are centered around "what is happening?". The purpose of the perspective changes to a monitoring aspect. This applies to your need for streaming analytics as well. For example, wanting to have a greater insight into your production processes though adding extra context in the form of data from your manufacturing execution system. We take this further into your actual machine and sensor data for variance and quality control metrics.

7 Future Perspective What is going to happen? Moving into the future perspective, we can see again that the nature of the question and purpose changes. Now we are wanting to understand why something took place or what will take place. The purpose of answering these types of questions aligns with driving desires, outcomes, and developing deeper insights. What's most important about this, is that each starts with a set of questions. From these questions, you can derive the nature and purpose of the questions. First, how typically these are answered, and finally, how that fits into the business intelligence strategy that drives value for your company. This allows you to break away from the deluge of products and features and move towards an agile delivery of value. This allows for continuous improvement as your company grows and changes.

8 People First People First With the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the people that make up your company are front and center. Having a people-first mindset allows you to move away from traditional technical talk and move toward the real value desired from business intelligence activites. There are several key factors that need to be understood in how a people-first focus sets the stage for highly successful business intelligence projects. First, you narrow the focus with the real stars of any given project, your business users. Second, you establish a process of collaboration that sets the correct priority around your questions and outcomes. Third, you establish the return on investment statements for each sprint as the modeled questions that are to be answered from a specific wave of deliverables. This approach allows for the internal and external resources to align with your business users, which leads to higher adoption rates since you engage with your business users at the onset of the targeted sprint of deliverables.

9 Process Second Process Second Having established your questions, the focus moves into the process of business dimensional modeling. This concept is where your key semantics are mapped from the questions. These dimensional models become the map for your project that will deliver value through the marriage of the business and technical, as well as the semantic and data. This modeling process is very non-technical at this point, and it is common to have several questions and business outcomes that map to a specific business dimensional model. Our approach to business intelligence at Hillstar allows for even higher adoption rates within your organization when deploying this approach. This process allows the business users to always map between what questions were initially targeted to what is being delivered to them. Giving the ability to then easily see the value as it directly relates to your business user questions. This process then builds trust and creates the vechile in which greater levels of success are achieved.

10 Data Third Data Third Once you understand the targeted questions and have them modeled with your company's semantics, your focus should move to the data. This is where the bridge between the business and technical worlds first meets. Here is where you might start to see the need for adding external data or crossing multiple systems-of-record to complete what the dimensional model calls for. Further activities around data quality, governance and other such topics will arise during this area of focus. This is also where the concepts of data warehouses start to come into scope. Having a place for the dimensional models to generate the semantic layer and reside in, is critical for being able to cross multiple points of data. This applies across your data living inside Microsoft Dynamics ERP, CRM, customer line-of-business applictions, the cloud and more. These all are valid targets in which having a concept like a data warehouse start to make more and more sense.

11 Technology Last Technology Last Now that you have established correct focus around people, process and data you are ready to focus on technology for delivery. This is where, all to often, business intelligence vendors focus their time and efforts on product and feature. With the value-driven business intelligence strategy BI is not something you can purchase. It is an on-going effort, that is iterative and collaborative between your business users, technical users and trusted business intelligence partner. For most companies, it's never a one size fits all" concept in relation to technology and tools. Having a Microsoft Dynamics ERP back end does afford you a great deal of technology within the Microsoft stack that can easily be crafted as part of your business intelligence story.

12 Truth is however, as your business grows, your needs change and so may the tools you use to deliver insights and answer those critical questions. This can span across mobile business intelligence concepts provided via MicroStrategy mobile. You can dive deeper into predictive modelings with Microsoft Azure machine learning and its integration with the modeling language R. Technology is important and you need a trusted business intelligence partner that are experts within the various stacks and tools that exist. A great business intelligence partner will be able to understand your business, your data, and in being experts in technology, craft stories of value with you and your company.

13 With the value-driven business intelligence strategy, you will achieve a greater deal of success via added value. With Hillstar, we employ this approach on every project but also jump start your journey with our data warehouse automation tool. We have taken the complexity out of the highly normalized schemas of Microsoft Dynamics AX and NAV instances where a lot of your important data is trapped. From day one, we provide a data warehouse, cubes, 100 s of measures and KPI s across sales, finance and your entire supply chain. Through our partnerships with Microsoft and MicroStrategy we further deliver on engaging stories that allow your company to further extend your insights across any data, on any device, and from anywhere.

14 How this works is we start with your instance, or instances, of Microsoft Dynamics. We then generate a best-practices designed data warehouse that can live either on-primise, in the cloud or in a hybrid mode. From this, we deliver out-of-the-box insights across several domains within your organization. We can then employ several presentation layer tools from the Microsoft and MicroStrategy stacks that fit into the natural way of how your users need to consume insights for better data informed decisions. We typically extend this data warehouse through connecting to any number of needed data sources that are present within your organization. We then complete the activities of answering the desired questions with greater context and within the semantics in which your organization operates. Our data warehouse that is generated targets across Manufacturing, Distribution, Wholesale and Retail verticals, including several specific focuses like ecommerce and more. What makes this even more impressive is that we can show you with your data what is delivered from day one and use that to model the initial sprint that will deliver your desired results of value. With our value-driven business intelligence strategy as well as our domain and technology expertise, we will craft a story of value with you and your organization that will continue to grow and be as dynamic as your company.

15 "From reports to analytics, Hillstar transforms your Microsoft Dynamics AX and NAV data into actionable insights." Chicago, IL Office 222 W.Merchandise Mart Plaza Suite 1225 Chicago, IL Netherlands Office Landjuweel PH Veenendaal Netherlands Brandon George Phone: Gadsden, AL Office 510 Chestnut St. Gadsden, AL United States of America