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Business Intelligence Strategy The goal of business intelligence is to deliver value for your company through access to trusted answers that drive business decisions. Value-Driven hillstarBi.com

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Page 1: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Business Intelligence Strategy

The goal of business intelligence is to deliver value foryour company through access to trusted answers that

drive business decisions.

Value-Driven

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Page 2: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Hillstar Business Solutions believes in the value-driven businessintelligence strategy. This starts with you and your company. Specifically,focusing on the questions you need to answer on a daily, weekly, andmonthly basis, furthering your understanding of business outcomes andstrategies that will enable your company to grow.

Starting with this understanding is how you can then take the first steptowards implementing the value-driven business intelligence strategy. Apeople first strategy implies that technology should not be the firstthing you really look at. Though technology is an important part to anysuccessful business intelligence recipe, technology is not businessintelligence. In fact, this is a big part of the issue that a lot of companiesare faced with today.

As you have noticed with your own company, tools are upgraded, added toand replaced, as your business grows. This is why implementing ourstrategy is a fresh way of looking at your real needs as well as workingwithin the context of iterative and collaborative techniques for delivering onpromised value. The strategy gives you a way to always look at yourbusiness intelligence goals in perspectives and layers that are easy tounderstand and create a framework that is as dynamic as your business.

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Page 3: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

In relation to being dynamic, a recent Gartner study found that 50% ofyour current business intelligence and analytics needs will change overthe course of the next 12 months. This means that having a strategy that isbuilt on iterative and collaborative execution will allow you to accept thisreality with welcoming arms.

Having this understanding helps concrete why you and your company canbenefit greatly from employing the value-driven business intelligencestrategy. Higher user adoption equals greater success rates in relation toyour business intelligence needs.

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Page 4: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work donein each perspective should feed forward into the natural progression ofactivities.

When it comes to the topic ofbusiness intelligence, there is a lotof technology and terminology thatpeople commonly use. However,when it comes to framing the realvalue desired from your company'sdata, the three perspectives ofbusiness intelligence are employed.

Past – Reactive reporting that commonly takes place across mostcompanies. This is the rearview mirror looking backwards only at what tookplace. Present – Here is where you find key performance indicators (KPI’s), as wellas streaming analytics for as-of-now insights. Future – Within this perspective we find predictive analytics, where as acompany is wanting to get out in front of specific business scenarios.

You track from the past perspective into the present. You improve from the present perspective into the future.You analyze the outcomes from the future perspective via the past.

This model aligns more naturally with your business and it's processes. Thiscan further be applied across your entire organization and whatever yoursolution footprint exists as. It allows you to easily categorize your questions anddesired business outcomes as you mature as an organization, in relation toyour data for making informed decisions.

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Page 5: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Looking at the example questions for the past perspective, you can see thenature of the question come through in “what happened?”.

Having the base understanding of how to classify your questions or businessoutcomes across the three perspectives, lets dive in with some examples. Thefirst example relates to the past perspective. Here you can see that we havethree attrtibutes that further define this example.

Question – Nature of the business question that drives modeling efforts.Purpose – Nature of the action or activities that take place duringanswering the desired business questions. Examples – Typical ways in which a consumer of the information interactswith the deliverables.

What happened?

Past Perspective

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Page 6: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

This applies to your need for streaming analytics as well. For example,wanting to have a greater insight into your production processes though addingextra context in the form of data from your manufacturing execution system. Wetake this further into your actual machine and sensor data for variance andquality control metrics.

Across the three perspectives, the same three attributes help them give greatercontext into the types of business questions that are modeled for each of them. You will notice that with the present perspective the nature of the question andpurpose changes. Now the business questions are centered around "what ishappening?". The purpose of the perspective changes to a monitoring aspect.

What is happening?

Present Perspective

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Page 7: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Moving into the future perspective, we can see again that the nature of thequestion and purpose changes. Now we are wanting to understand whysomething took place or what will take place. The purpose of answering thesetypes of questions aligns with driving desires, outcomes, and developing deeperinsights.

What's most important about this, is that each starts with a set of questions.From these questions, you can derive the nature and purpose of the questions.First, how typically these are answered, and finally, how that fits into thebusiness intelligence strategy that drives value for your company. This allowsyou to break away from the deluge of products and features and move towardsan agile delivery of value. This allows for continuous improvement as yourcompany grows and changes.

What is going to happen?

Future Perspective

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Page 8: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

First, you narrow the focus with the real stars of any given project, yourbusiness users. Second, you establish a process of collaboration that sets thecorrect priority around your questions and outcomes. Third, you establish thereturn on investment statements for each sprint as the modeled questions thatare to be answered from a specific wave of deliverables.

With the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the people that make upyour company are front and center. Having a people-first mindset allows youto move away from traditional technical talk and move toward the real valuedesired from business intelligence activites. There are several key factors thatneed to be understood in how a people-first focus sets the stage for highlysuccessful business intelligence projects.

This approach allows for the internal and external resources to alignwith your business users, which leads to higher adoption rates since youengage with your business users at the onset of the targeted sprint ofdeliverables.

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People First

People First

Page 9: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Having established your questions, the focus moves into the process of businessdimensional modeling. This concept is where your key semantics are mappedfrom the questions. These dimensional models become the map for your projectthat will deliver value through the marriage of the business and technical, as wellas the semantic and data.

This modeling process is very non-technical at this point, and it is common tohave several questions and business outcomes that map to a specific businessdimensional model. Our approach to business intelligence at Hillstar allowsfor even higher adoption rates within your organization when deployingthis approach. This process allows the business users to always map betweenwhat questions were initially targeted to what is being delivered to them. Givingthe ability to then easily see the value as it directly relates to your business userquestions.

This process then builds trust and creates the vechile in which greater levels ofsuccess are achieved.

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Process Second

Process Second

Page 10: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Once you understand the targeted questions and have them modeled with yourcompany's semantics, your focus should move to the data. This is where thebridge between the business and technical worlds first meets. Here is whereyou might start to see the need for adding external data or crossing multiplesystems-of-record to complete what the dimensional model calls for.

Further activities around data quality, governance and other such topics willarise during this area of focus. This is also where the concepts of datawarehouses start to come into scope. Having a place for the dimensionalmodels to generate the semantic layer and reside in, is critical for beingable to cross multiple points of data. This applies across your data livinginside Microsoft Dynamics ERP, CRM, customer line-of-business applictions,the cloud and more. These all are valid targets in which having a concept like adata warehouse start to make more and more sense.

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Data Third

Data Third

Page 11: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Now that you have established correct focus around people, process and datayou are ready to focus on technology for delivery. This is where, all to often,business intelligence vendors focus their time and efforts on product andfeature. With the value-driven business intelligence strategy BI is notsomething you can purchase. It is an on-going effort, that is iterative andcollaborative between your business users, technical users and trustedbusiness intelligence partner.

For most companies, it's never a “one size fits all" concept in relation totechnology and tools. Having a Microsoft Dynamics ERP back end does affordyou a great deal of technology within the Microsoft stack that can easily becrafted as part of your business intelligence story.

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Technology Last

Technology Last

Page 12: Value Driven Business Intelligence Strategy€¦ · When employing the value-driven business intelligence strategy, the work done in each perspective should feed forward into the

Truth is however, as your business grows, your needs change and somay the tools you use to deliver insights and answer those criticalquestions. This can span across mobile business intelligence conceptsprovided via MicroStrategy mobile. You can dive deeper into predictivemodelings with Microsoft Azure machine learning and its integration withthe modeling language R.

Technology is important and you need a trusted business intelligencepartner that are experts within the various stacks and tools that exist. Agreat business intelligence partner will be able to understand yourbusiness, your data, and in being experts in technology, craft stories ofvalue with you and your company.

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With the value-driven business intelligence strategy, you will achieve agreater deal of success via added value. With Hillstar, we employ thisapproach on every project but also jump start your journey with ourdata warehouse automation tool. We have taken the complexity out ofthe highly normalized schemas of Microsoft Dynamics AX and NAVinstances where a lot of your important data is trapped.

From day one, we provide a data warehouse, cubes, 100’s of measuresand KPI’s across sales, finance and your entire supply chain. Throughour partnerships with Microsoft and MicroStrategy we further deliveron engaging stories that allow your company to further extend yourinsights across any data, on any device, and from anywhere.

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How this works is we start with your instance, or instances, of MicrosoftDynamics. We then generate a best-practices designed data warehousethat can live either on-primise, in the cloud or in a hybrid mode. Fromthis, we deliver out-of-the-box insights across several domains within yourorganization. We can then employ several presentation layer tools from theMicrosoft and MicroStrategy stacks that fit into the natural way of howyour users need to consume insights for better data informed decisions.

We typically extend this data warehouse through connecting to any numberof needed data sources that are present within your organization. We thencomplete the activities of answering the desired questions with greatercontext and within the semantics in which your organization operates. Ourdata warehouse that is generated targets across Manufacturing,Distribution, Wholesale and Retail verticals, including several specificfocuses like eCommerce and more.

What makes this even more impressive is that we can show you with yourdata what is delivered from day one and use that to model the initial sprintthat will deliver your desired results of value. With our value-driven businessintelligence strategy as well as our domain and technology expertise, wewill craft a story of value with you and your organization that willcontinue to grow and be as dynamic as your company.

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Gadsden, AL Office510 Chestnut St.Gadsden, AL 35901United States of America

Brandon George Email: [email protected]: 256-393-0005www.HillstarBi.com

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