Business Intelligence Solutions

How to Make Business Intelligence Work

If you want to unlock the business intelligence in your enterprise and ensure success; you need a senior team with a proven process and track record. Goodwill's BI practice features a team of seasoned practice leaders. Combining technical, business, and vertical expertise with proven methodology and knowledge management skills, we build on successes at each stage of development - to capitalize on ensuring a BI solution that delivers meaningful value to your organization. Goodwill's business intelligence solutions and services include:

BI Solutions

BI Dashboard and Scorecards
BI Enterprise Reporting
BI Data Quality Management
BI Readiness Assessment
BI Tool Evaluation

Business Intelligence Services

BI Strategy and Roadmap
BI Discovery
Planning and Scope
Data Modeling
Data Warehouse / Data Mart Implementation
Data Cleansing and Conversion
Report Design and Generation
Training and Knowledge Transfer
Database Administration

BI Dashboard and Scorecard Solutions

Our dashboard and scorecard tools provide stunning insight into critical performance metrics about your business. The easy-to-understand gauges, dials, and report graphics, as well as trending indicators and specific numerical measures, allow you to quickly identify vital areas of your business that need immediate attention. The terms "dashboards" and "corecards"are often overused and misunderstood. These tools only work correctly when the underlying data is accurate, timely, and well defined. Goodwill takes the time to help decision makers make sense of the data at their disposal, and has the right process to create order out of chaos. Our team can help customers reach consensus on defining common metrics as well as develop data quality programs and processes for accurately loading data into dashboard and scorecards.

BI Enterprise Reporting Solutions

The strongest and most successful business intelligence solution is one that provides consistent and timely reporting to a myriad of users across the enterprise. Whether implementing industrial strength products from vendors such as Business Objects, COGNOS, SAS, or Oracle, to open source options from JasperSoft or Pentaho: Goodwill has the right team for the job. Clients are often plagued by reports that are difficult to navigate and do not meet the end-user needs. This causes a multitude of small groups within the organization creating their own individual "reporting databases" to meet their specific needs. These "preadmarts" make it increasingly difficult to create a consistent view of the enterprise from various stakeholder perspectives. Goodwill utilizes a proprietary BI enterprise reporting methodology to address these and many other issues. Our proactive approach leverages a blend of agile and waterfall development styles to deliver a robust user-friendly reporting solution.

BI Data Quality Management Solutions

Data quality often dictates the success of a business intelligence project. The most common complaint heard from the user community is that the information displayed on their reports, dashboard, or scorecards is incorrect. This leads users to abandon the system and creates considerable re-work for the development team. Goodwill emphasizes data quality at the beginning of every BI engagement and continues this emphasis throughout the entire lifecycle. Our focus on data quality includes gaining stakeholder consensus on definition of master data and metrics, identifying data stewards, building and launching data quality programs, and establishing processes for analyzing and remediating data issues. No one will argue the virtue of accurate and timely data. However, many BI systems are implemented with data quality taking a back seat to the front-end graphic user interface. This is often caused by timeline demands placed on the BI teams for quick development and launch. However, the trade-off becomes evident when users begin to reject the system for its lack of data fidelity. The Goodwill Roadmap methodology makes data quality the cornerstone of its success. Immediately after gathering business requirements, we launch data profiling activity. We analyze each data source for its ability to meet the needs of the business. Through rapid feedback, Goodwill BI can set expectations with the business and IT community. Any gaps in the data are documented using our templates and the results are discussed and addressed as a team.

BI Readiness Assessment

Data quality often dictates the success of a business intelligence project. The most common complaint heard from the user community is that the information displayed on their reports, dashboard, or scorecards is incorrect. This leads users to abandon the system and creates considerable re-work for the development team. Goodwill emphasizes data quality at the beginning of every BI engagement and continues this emphasis throughout the entire lifecycle. Our focus on data quality includes gaining stakeholder consensus on definition of master data and metrics, identifying data stewards, building and launching data quality programs, and establishing processes for analyzing and remediating data issues. After data quality, poor change management is the second most common reason for failed business intelligence projects. A BI system impacts people by helping improve process efficiencies and increasing productivity. Organizations that neglect the human element in a BI system miss one of the greatest opportunities for improvement. In order to gain the most value from a business intelligence implementation, companies must realize that a BI system evolves as new data is introduced and users begin to understand its value. It is a continuous cycle of planning, implementing, learning, and adjusting processes, people and technologies as needed. Goodwill understands the challenges companies face when embarking on a BI implementation and can therefore assist IT and business sponsors to gain the greatest ROI in business intelligence.

BI Tool Evaluation

Goodwill BI works with some of the best known business intelligence, data warehouse and database product companies in the world. BI vendors include SAS, Business Objects, COGNOS, Microstrategy, Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle, and many more. Through years of experience, Goodwill BI has developed evaluation criteria for a multitude of industries to help clients make the best tool selection for their needs. We take on the role of a trusted advisor to our clients. Our philosophy is to make the best possible recommendation void of any vendor influence. Our extensive evaluation efforts include analyses of alternatives for government agencies and scalability tests on competing technologies.