Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology discipline that helps organizations better understand historical, current, and predictive views of the business operation. Simply put, an effective BI strategy helps business managers make more effective business decisions. The Northridge BI team is committed to helping clients achieve business goals by employing business consulting and proven best practices gleaned from numerous successful BI engagements. Northridge assesses your current BI and corporate reporting environments, consults with your senior managers across departments regarding business performance, and then plans a robust BI roadmap to enable better future business decisions.
Northridge BI Assessment & Planning engagements involve a cohesive series of steps to determine a client's current BI and reporting maturity and plan for realizing the maximum potential from a BI solution.
Some of the key aspects of a Northridge BI Assessment and Planning engagement include:
- Environmental assessment - A review covering data management
including data warehousing, online analytical processing (OLAP), and
data integration; information delivery including dashboards and portals;
managed reporting and visualization; query; reporting and analytics
including impromptu reporting and Microsoft Office Excel®–based OLAP
analysis; and performance management including financial modeling,
planning, budgeting, scorecards, and dashboards.
- Architecture and design - A BI Blueprint comprising architectural
guidance based on specific BI needs and technology investments.
- Lab validation - A proof-of-concept based on Microsoft BI technologies
using sample data from the customer environment.
- Documentation and solution development - A forward-looking BI
plan tailored to client business objectives, along with a BI roadmap covering next steps.
Whether it’s making full use of existing investments or integrating new Microsoft BI technology within the business, Northridge will provide a clear vision of the full BI potential within the organization as well as a road map for achieving that potential.
Although the BI Assessment and Planning steps are critically important to the success of any BI implementation, an overall BI program within an organization requires ongoing governance and management. The Northridge BI team works with clients throughout an implementation to establish the necessary ongoing BI Governance roles, responsibilities, and processes to ensure the organization extracts the maximum long-term value from the BI environment.