Accounting Oversight Organization
Business Intelligence Roadmap Development

Business Challenge

The Business Intelligence Roadmap project was initiated to identify the business and technical gaps associated with the management of data, reporting, and data analysis. The client is a private, nonprofit corporation created by government mandate to oversee the auditors of public companies; thus accurate and accessible data was essential to achieving government mandates.

The client was having operational issues related to the current business intelligence solution. Data analysts and other business users wanted to be empowered to complete the following daily operations: access data, search data in user-friendly manner, conduct data queries, develop custom ad-hoc reports, spend less time collecting and verifying data in order to spend more time conducting research and analysis, and define relationships with data shared across business groups.

Solution

Acumen Solutions provided experienced consultants to conduct focus meetings with various business groups, business analysts, IT development group, and business executive management. We gathered business requirements and analyzed current processes, tools, and technologies. The Acumen Solutions team completed the following approach and activities to deliver the recommended state and roadmap document for the business intelligence improvement initiative:

• Capture short and long term business objectives and requirements
• Analyze and document ‘current’ business process as it relates to data flow
• Document operational and reporting solution requests
• Document ‘current’ state of reporting solution and data warehouse
• Translate findings and client/customer needs or wants to generate a preliminary business requirement document
• Recommend a flexible architecture at will support clients’ changing business needs
• Document ‘roadmap’ recommendation with implementation modules and prioritizations, project plan for implementations, tools and architecture recommendations, costs for business reporting tools, hardware, and resources, cost estimations per module

Technology / Business Expertise

Acumen Solutions performed a comprehensive analysis of the technology environment to determine why the Enterprise Data Warehouse was not meeting the end user needs. Acumen reviewed the data architecture, data model, ETL routines, BI design, and development procedures. Acumen Solutions performed a Software Tool Review for all of Data Warehouse products: ETL Tools – Informactica, Microsoft SSIS; BI Tools – Microstrategy, Microsoft SSRS; DB Tools – Oracle, Microsoft.

Return on Investment

Acumen Solutions team members leveraged their management consulting skills to provide the client a reporting solution recommendation and a means to achieve the desired solution state. The business intelligence reporting tool recommendation will empower the business analysts to create accurate standard and custom reports around their customers’ requests. By creating data mart architecture and simplifying the data migration process, the data will be more accurate and consistent data relationships for trending and analysis.

Accounting Oversight Organization - Business Intelligence Roadmap Development