Insight and Action to Improve Excellence in BI

Your personalized BI score mapped to seven best practice categories for your industry

Baseline’s Business Intelligence (BI) Scorecard service is a “reality check”. Are your projects on the right track? Or how do you get them back on track?

The Business Intelligence Scorecard is a structured assessment of how your company’s current business intelligence and data warehouse deployments map to a set of best practice categories for acknowledged leaders in your industry.

The BI Scorecard accounts for your company’s unique business drivers and requirements, your established IT standards, and your project history. Thus no two BI Scorecard assessments are the same.

Baseline’s BI Scorecard service helps zero in on root cause problems, eliminate roadblocks, and propel companies forward to the next level of BI and data warehouse excellence.

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

Your Challenges

• Responding to new business requirements
• Sharing data among business functions and across BI applications
• Resolving system performance issues
• Building the BI organization
• Defining repeatable development processes
• Achieving user adoption and satisfaction
• Determining value received from the BI investment

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The Problem

Multiple problems perceived, but clear path to resolution illusive

It’s not easy. Making sure that business requirements are realized with each new project iteration. Bridging the gap between the existing IT infrastructure and strategic objectives. Ensuring that the systems you’re building drive value.

Often companies perceive multiple problems with their data warehouse, data management, or business intelligence (BI) initiatives. But they can’t quite put their finger on what the problems are or where to start addressing them.

If your company is looking for a clear path to tackle the BI issues below, BI Scorecard can help:

• Justify and obtain new or additional funding.
• Incorporate new business requirements into the BI development framework.
• Address business stakeholders’ dissatisfaction with existing BI capabilities.
• Understand and resolve gaps in skill sets and organizational structures.
• Resolve system performance, scalability, or capacity issues.
• Evaluate proposed technology upgrades or replacements.
• Expand the depth and breadth of current toolsets.
• Reduce data acquisition and replication across applications and systems.
• Reuse data across a variety of enterprise functions.
• Implement BI and data governance processes.
• Establish formal processes around data and metadata management.

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The Baseline Approach

A current state assessment with step-by-step improvement tactics

The BI Scorecard includes seven categories and sub-categories – each accompanied by its own metrics, interview questions, and scoring procedures. The categories include:

• Requirements Gathering
• Data Management
• Database Platform and Architecture
• ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)
• Production Management and Support
• Organizational Roles and Responsibilities
• Project Management

Baseline delivers the BI Scorecard results via a comprehensive presentation that includes categories, scores and rankings. You receive a detailed description of your company’s current state for each ranking.

BI Scorecard transcends a simple “grading” of current practices. It recommends deliberate tactical plans that will drive improvements in each category. BI Scorecard facilitates the dialog and understanding within your organization to take the next steps forward.

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Your Value

Business and IT alignment around BI issues, opportunities, and action plans

BI Scorecard can be a significant milestone in the evolution of BI at your company. The benefits include:

• Renewed management attention on data warehousing and BI as bona-fide business initiatives.
• Additional funding for recommended improvements.
• Willingness to invest in previously questioned projects, such as metadata management.
• Cost savings from application or platform integration.
• Revenue growth from new capabilities that support business organizations like marketing and sales.
• Job roles better aligned to actual work activities.
• Organizational re-alignment, often in support of the Center of Excellence model.

In delivering dozens of BI Scorecard projects, Baseline observes our clients using the scorecard as a forum to reacquaint business stakeholders and IT executives with both the issues and opportunities around BI. It becomes a platform for making investment decisions for significant improvement. BI Scorecard helps propel companies forward to the next level of BI and data warehouse excellence.

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Why Baseline

Comprehensive and tailored recommendations backed by 15 years BI advisory and implementation expertise

Baseline avoids the “cookie-cutter” approach common to other consultancies. Each BI Scorecard deliverable is as unique as each Baseline customer.

Baseline creates a holistic picture of your BI and data warehouse environment then zeros in on common problem areas. This allows us to analyze the issues, make connections, draw relationships, and isolate root causes of the real problems.

Baseline’s BI Scorecard service combines our experience on client engagements with our regular service as judges of industry best practice awards. Baseline has judged the Intelligent Enterprise annual awards in the data warehousing and CRM categories. We have been judges of The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) Best Practice Leadership Awards every year since 2000.

CheckFree Corporation and AARP are two Baseline clients who implemented our BI Scorecard recommendations and were subsequently named best practice leaders.

BI Scorecard is your tool to evolving the maturity of your BI and data warehousing programs and increasing their strategic business value.

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