Business Intelligence, Analytics and Information Management
FutureNow offers world class capabilities in the Business Intelligence. For us, BI is a strategic investment area, with the strong support and personal interest of senior leadership.
We deliver end-to-end solutions in technologies, ranging from Teradata, Oracle, Microsoft, Informatica, Cognos (IBM) and Business Objects (SAP). FutureNow delivers a broad spectrum of services from strategy, planning, design, implementation to management and hosting.
Business Intelligence solutions from FutureNow can:
- Improve collaboration/workflow
- Reduce costs associated with management of information
- Support self service for employees, partners and clients
- Automate and improve legacy processes
- Reduce costs associated with business operations
As the economic realities change, new opportunities emerge and organizations must be positioned to capitalize on them. Business Intelligence solutions accelerate business growth by helping:
- Faster, accurate decisions
- Accelerated time-to-market
- Visibility in business performance
- Creation and management of new business models
- Culture of innovation through access to right information at the right time
We solve our partners’ most pressing challenges which are; specialization and focus in high-volume, complex environments; vertical expertise; breadth and depth of service offerings through all phases of implementation. We integrate a variety of best-in-class tools across the enterprise to create an agile information platform.
Your ability to accomplish your business goals is dependent upon your access to quality, real-time information about your operations. FutureNow Business Intelligence Services reviews your current environment, collaborates with your personnel and then develops a BI project plan focused on your priorities.
Our capabilities include:
- Business Intelligence Strategy and Management services bring together technical and business aspects of a client organization to conduct detailed planning needed for an effective BI program. We can focus upon an overall BI program or specific aspects of the program, including functional areas, tool selection, and organizational development.
- Data Integration and Data Warehousing services offer a solid foundation for sharing data across your organization. We assess your current initiatives to identify areas for improvement; identify, extract, transform and integrate existing data; plan, architect, design, build, test, and deploy data warehouses; architect information delivery solutions; and host data warehouse operations.
- Performance Management and Analytics services apply data mining, predictive analytics, forecasting, and other advanced analytics to allow an organization to derive insight from information to measure performance.
- Information Strategy and Governance services establish the organization, functions and principles for managing data that is available, consistent, track able, auditable and secure.
- Information Quality Management services create the organizational structure, processes and procedures, and technical architecture for identifying, monitoring, reporting, and improving quality of information.
- Master Data Management services include development and maintenance of organizations, processes along with tools to ensure that every master data element is captured, stored, and made available across an organization.
The Implementation Process
To deliver value quickly to you, we leverage best practices and can use a phased approach to implement your new BI environment. This facilitates collaboration, planning and communication. This also ensures the solution is aligned with your goals, processes and culture. Stages of our Implementation approach:
- Define
- Analyze
- Design
- Produce
- Optimize
- Implement
Our governance model supports this approach and provides rigorous standards that facilitate a successful outcome. With this model, you maintain visibility into the project and provide project buy-in every step of the way.
Define Phase
Your processes, business requirements and the groups that access and use the business intelligence data are mapped out. Additional insights based on our experience are added to expedite planning and analysis.
The following deliverables are developed:
- Initial project plan
- Request for approval of key resources
- Request for approval of proposed location facilities
- Request for approval of all subcontracts
- Issue tracking procedures
- Change control procedures
- Systems development methodology / standards
- Defined configuration management procedures
Analyze Phase
The analysis consists of discovery activities with respect to people and business needs of your business units. There is an investigation to identify and review all relevant documentation and begin source systems analysis. We use the following:
- RFP and data room contents
- Strategy documents
- Existing forms, letters, reports and other named relevant artifacts
- Source system descriptions, data dictionaries/record layouts
- Your reporting requirements and government/state and federal jurisdictions
- Documentation of current BI tools
Detailed planning and work sessions with representative members of the groups who will use the analytical capabilities of the delivered environment to support their decision making are critically important. We also interview senior management to capture specific organizational metrics and key performance indicators, if required. The major deliverable at this stage is the general Data Warehouse Business Design document
Design Phase
In the design phase, FutureNow defines and confirms the data and technical architectures. This is important for realizing how successfully the environment meets your business requirements and goals. Our experience and expertise play an important part in delivering robust architectures that are extensible and scalable, reducing rework and costs associated with future modifications and enhancements.
The following sets of architectural documents are the work products of the design phase:
Data Architecture
Summary of business requirements:
- Logical data model
- Metadata architecture
- Metadata scope and definition
- Business calculations and algorithms
- Data source definitions
- Flow of data from provider data stores to information consumers
- Granularity, volume and frequency of data loads
- Source-to-target data mappings
- ETL services
- Data administration standards
- Data access services architecture (metadata, security, query, reporting, desktops, tools, Internet)
- Aggregations and hierarchies
Technical Architecture
- BI architectural framework
- Processes and tools to be applied to the data
- Data management services architecture (ETL, backup, archive)
- Infrastructure plan
- Security plan
Production Phase
Adhering to the reviewed and approved architectural design specifications, our project team constructs the flexible, full-function BI solution. We develop plans for implementation, loading, testing and training during the construction stage. The processes include:
- Develop the physical data model that implements components of the logical model produced in the architecture and design stage
- Develop the physical storage structure (partitioning, RAID and so on)
- Acquire, install and integrate software and hardware components
- Design and implement the physical data structure (tables, columns, relationships, views, indexes and so on)
- Design and build the database (scripts, parameter settings and so on)
- Build, integrate and test data staging and ETL services
- Build, integrate and test metadata
- Build, integrate and test information delivery access and presentation/desktop access services
- Build, integrate and test security infrastructure
- Test load data into the database
- Produce required documentation, including user guides, administrative guides, technical support guides, training materials,help desk materials
- Prepare a detailed implementation plan to establish the production environment and plan for the transition to the user population
- Execute organizational change strategies to prepare the user organization for the completed system
Optimization Phase
We carry out system verifications and performance testing of the production environment. Once the system is tuned and optimized, formal acceptance testing is performed.
Implement Phase
Our consultants provide systems training and coach you on the use of the new analytic tools. Operations are transferred and the live production environment is delivered. At this stage, we:
- Perform help desk support
- Provide program management
- Provide system management
