Business Intelligence Solutions

CONSULTING ACTIVITIES

Aasonn works with our customers to help them achieve strategic information advantage. This approach ensures that all Business Intelligence Initiatives are designed to deliver business results in the least amount of time. We do this by creating corporate data marts that are replete with conforming dimensions sustained by a comprehensive corporate taxonomy.

This approach to data warehousing ensures that the warehouse delivers value and can scale and grow with the customer’s business and competitive needs. We view our mission as ensuring successful projects that produce results, thus garnering internal corporate support and immediate return on investment.

Every Aasonn engagement is designed for specific client requirements with deliverables that support the scope of the project. All of Aasonn's engagements also follow the Ralph Kimball data mart methodology utilizing Ralph Kimball's data warehouse toolkit. As you would expect, we have added our own enhancements and pre generated documentation to ensure project success.

CONSULTING SOLUTIONS

Data Warehouse Readiness (DWR)

There are many things to consider before you start a new Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse project. Successful projects require that the business and technology environments are prepared for the project and are able to support it. Technology aside, the DWR is the most important step for a potential project. Our consultant will interview key business and IT sponsors and work with your management to identify stakeholders for the project. We will analyze your business requirements, assess executive commitment levels, and survey your technology architecture and data points to determine your core technical/data issues.

Our key deliverables include:

Assessment of scope for proposed project
Work with management to create a justification document
Draft and propose the major milestones for the project
Identify initial and subsequent phases
Summary document outlining next steps and overall assessment

Project Review & Assessment (PRA)

A Project Review and Assessment is valuable to both projects that may have already begun or are excellent for existing functioning data warehouse environments where a health check is called for.

A PRA helps you understand where you are at and are Kimball best practices being followed. The PRA allows you to bring one or more of AASONN's senior data warehouse experts in to establish a checkpoint for the project. It requires a development and/or maintenance environment that is open to suggestions and open to critique. The results can be essential to keeping a project on time and on track.

We are able to provide an assessment on the state of your data warehouse or the status of your BI project. We will deliver a list of remedial actions along with best practices recommendations for implementing corrective actions if required. Based on the requirements of the project or the environment as well as the scope and progress of the initiative, our PRA team typically focuses on Kimball's four critical aspects of a data warehouse environment:

Organization
Usage
Data
technical infrastructure.

Business Requirements Development & Analysis (BRDA)

Ensuring that the alignment of the data warehouse with the business requirements of the business sponsors and stakeholders is essential to a successful data warehouse project. Technology alone cannot create a successful data warehouse project if the scope of the project falls short of the needs of the business. Business requirements are the most essential and critical step in a data warehouse implementation.

Aasonn's key project resources will interview your key business managers and corporate taxonomists in order to determine their project related business objectives. We then work with your business sponsors and stakeholders to determine, analytic requirements. Next we help your staff determine the expected impact on the business.

Once the previous steps are complete we establish, with the help of your internal data warehouse resources, the key success factors for the project. During the BRDA we interview your data stewards to determine data requirements. Data stewards are usually IT workers who are knowledgeable about key data sources so that all players in the project team will understand access methods, data reliability, and access requirements.

Aasonn's deliverables typically covers the following topics:

Establish the scope of the Data Warehouse
Determine the intended use of the Warehouse
Define and prioritize business requirements that the Warehouse will address
Identify business objectives that influence the required data and application architectures
Determine business subject areas that provide most needed information
Develop the logical data model that will direct the physical implementation model
Measure the quality, availability, and related costs of needed source data at a high level
Define the iterative population projects based on business needs and data validation

Design Specification & Dimensional Modeling (DSDM)

The Design Specification and Dimensional Modeling project will produce a design document and a dimensional model that both reflects the business requirements and analysis needs of the business sponsors and stakeholders. The Design Specification follows the Kimball approach and will describe the fact and dimension tables, associated columns with lists of valid values, mapping, and important transformations.

The dimensional model approach has been adopted to model data warehouses and data marts for a relational database with a star schema. With a dimensional modeling approach the traditional normalization techniques are not utilized. With the dimensional model a mixed approach of highly normalized portions of the model and highly denormalized parts of the model are utilized instead. The dimensional model is centered on two types of entities, facts and dimensions. Facts are entities that deal with measurements or indicators. The Dimensional Model, according to Ralph Kimball, delivers a footprint for the data mart that is both easy to use and provides the necessary query performance so that results will be both timely and enforce corporate taxonomy.

With this project we deliver two of the strategic pieces of the data warehouse:

The Design Specification Document
The Dimensional Model

Full Life Cycle Business Intelligence Projects

Every Business Intelligence project that Aasonn begins starts with a thorough review of the Aasonn Business Intelligence project methodology with the Business Sponsors and Stakeholders for the initiative. Our Full Life Cycle project methodology can take you from start to finish with your Business Intelligence initiative giving you a quick return on your investment and garnering additional corporate support.

Aasonn utilizes the Ralph Kimball project methodology and can start your project off to a solid beginning with our Readiness Assessment. The readiness assessment determines the prerequisites for the project and establishes the milestones and subsequent phases necessary for a successful BI initiative.

Senior Project Team Members make the difference
Once the Assessment is completed we start the project in earnest and utilize senior data warehouse and business intelligence developers and project managers who have years of experience in developing state of the art data warehouses and BI applications. These professionals make all the difference to the success of a project. Many larger firms utilize the Overwhelm Methodology which means that they bring literally dozens of junior members of their firm to learn on the project at your cost guided by a few, overwhelmed, senior project managers and technical experts. While eventually this approach will succeed it is usually more costly and requires much rework to solve the problems caused by the less experienced junior members.

Early Success is a must have requirement
Our approach requires that our customers staff are equal partners in the project. Our project methodology utilizes an iterative process and is targeted at achieving measurable results in the shortest time frame; usually 30, 60 or 90 days. By doing this we mitigate as much risk as possible while providing value early on in the project.

Success means Professional Scope Management
How do we ensure the success of your project? We do that by managing the scope of the project and constantly rechecking the business objectives with the direction and progress of the project. The success of the project comes down to competent and professional scope management. If a project veers off course, the outcome and the dates begin to slip thus jeopardizing the success of the project and losing support within our customer's management and executive sponsorship group.