A Development Team of Experienced Professionals

Supplementing your IT staff with BI application skills

Business Intelligence (BI) Application Delivery is a “pared down” version of Baseline’s Data Warehouse Build service. It applies our proven development methods, experience, and skill sets, but concentrates exclusively on the deployment of the BI application.

Our BI Application Delivery service leverages your existing data and technologies to deliver key reports and analytics to end-users, whose perception of a data warehouse is often only as good as the tools they see on their desktops.

When your company is ready for new BI application functionality, but is resource constrained, Baseline has the skills and experience to help.

» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline

Your Challenges

• Forcing BI delivery to take a back seat due to limited resources
• Developers working on more than one IT project at a time
• Enterprise-wide IT initiatives absorbing all existing resources
• Lack of experience with a new BI tool
• Engaging business users in requirements gathering for BI applications

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The Problem

Business needs for BI go begging when IT is resource constrained

Resource-challenged IT departments must choose where to apply their scarce dollars, time, and skills. Which projects merit the best developers? What are the business priorities and timelines? Where is outsourcing necessary? What does the business consider their most urgent need?

With the emergence of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and other new technologies, many IT departments choose to focus their resources on architecture and infrastructure issues that position the company for the long-term.

In the meantime, business users must wait for query generators, reports, dashboards, and other tools to help them do their jobs. Business intelligence (BI) delivery often takes a back seat when IT is resource constrained.

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The Baseline Approach

Sustainable improvements to your BI development method

Historically there has been an over-emphasis on BI application deployment at the expense of establishing solid and sustainable data warehouse architectures. Baseline believes that best-in-class companies follow a structured progression path in the development of their business intelligence programs—they don’t skip steps.

That path, as outlined in The Baseline Data Warehouse Framework, starts with business needs analysis, creates a set of candidate BI applications, gathers business requirements, scopes projects, and then moves on to database design and development. BI application delivery is the final step.

In addition, Baseline’s BI Application Delivery service represents more than simply building an application using one of the prevailing vendor tools. It also includes:

• Metrics based vendor evaluation and selection.
• Application design.
• Customization of packaged or off-the-shelf application tools.
• Prototyping and rapid development techniques.
• Systems architecture.
• End-user training.

Data Warehouse Development Process

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Your Value

BI functionality delivered incrementally every 60 to 90 days

By retaining Baseline for BI Application Delivery, your company can focus on more pressing needs of business analysis, infrastructure construction, architecture design, master data management, and organizational alignment with the business.

We provision key functionality to the end-user community that leverages re-usable data and delivers measurable business value. Baseline’s approach ensures that business stakeholders constantly see results, either in the form of new data or new functionality delivered on a regular basis – ideally every 60 to 90 days.

We leave behind annotated models, documented code, structured business analysis, and comprehensive metadata. Furthermore, we introduce permanent approaches to your BI development process, such as the BI Application Portfolio, that ensure sustainable improvements over time.

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Why Baseline

Coupling BI development skills with end-user engagement for positive outcomes

Some vendors perceive BI development to be a commodity skill. However, our experience proves that end-users’ positive perception of their analysis and reporting capabilities is directly proportional to how they were engaged before, during, and after BI development. In fact, BI development requires sound communications skills and stakeholder expectations management – perhaps more than it requires knowledge of the tool itself.

Baseline leverages a range of specialized skills for the BI Application Delivery service, including:

• Familiarity with the principles and tactics of “agile development”.
• Knowledge of storyboarding and screen design.
• Experience with application- and database-level metadata solutions.
• An understanding of the trade-offs of customization.
• Knowledge of a wide variety of toolsets such as: Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Microsoft, Microstrategy, Noetix, Oracle, Siebel, SAP, SAS, Siebel, and others.

When you pair BI Application Delivery with other Baseline service offerings, such as Business Discovery, BI Application Portfolio, and Data Warehouse Build, you set your company on a path that treats business intelligence as an ongoing, strategic information program.

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