Project overview:
The sheer volume of data organisations are gathering is accelerating. It seems everything is a potential data point for analysis these days. This data is fast becoming the new battle ground for organisations searching for those cost savings or insights that lead to a competitive advantage. This can be very overwhelming. Often there is a broad strokes approach. Managers often declare “lets just get everything out of applications and put it all into one big data warehouse.” Sounds simple… But this is always a mistake and is the lazy approach that ultimately leads to vast overspends on looking after your data. Very quickly you get to a point where 90% of your Data Management cost is spent looking after data that no one is using or reporting on or that delivers no organisational benefit whatsoever.
When it comes to BI Reporting the only sure way to get what the business needs is to start with questions to the business, at G3M we get Business Managers to write down the questions they wish or would like their reporting tools to answer. We then look around the organisation systems to see if the data is available or recommend ways to get it, efficiently. Having done that you can design the reports, get feedback and sign off from the business that they are going to get what they need, knowing that the reports can be delivered and at what cost.
Then and only then can you design your data extractions to get what you need, without any clag or unnecessary data holding up the process or making life difficult. There should be total clarity at this point as to the type of data and each and every field is known to be useful. Simplicity here = scalability, reliability, performance and not to mention ease of maintenance. This all adds up to less cost in the long term.
Lightweight BI reporting solutions are also more scalable out to mobile devices, allowing you to mix and match data from different sources, some real time and some based on period refreshes, and get them to users on the devices they chose to use.
