BI Architectural Assessment

Founded in the late 1950s with a mission to improve the financial well-being of America’s professional military families, the company today serves clients from all walks of life at all stages of life. As a Registered Investment Adviser firm, the company develops and delivers comprehensive financial plans to assist American families in their efforts to reduce debt, build wealth and pursue their financial goals and dreams.

Overview

The company is undertaking new business initiatives to expand its base of Advisors, provide customers a wider array of products, and adapt its business model to a changing financial market. These initiatives will require a greater use and emphasis on customer data for targeted marketing, customer up- and cross-selling, analysis of product and customer profitability, and customer service. These initiatives also require strong support to the company’s Financial Advisors, who require access to customer data, product offerings, and an easy-to-use system for sales and support.

Strategy and Goals

The company’s executive management has included Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and BrokerDealer  Software as two of the company’s top five objectives. Each of these two initiatives is cross-functional and requires data from many of the company’s application systems. Addressing the technical approaches for supporting these initiatives have fallen to the Enterprise Architecture group in IT. Enterprise solutions are challenging because they must meet the needs of several departments, gather and integrate data from several disparate application systems, and deliver data that has the highest level of integrity, correctness, and consistency. This is especially true for Customer data, the handling and use of which is technically known as a subset of Master Data Management.

The Enterprise Architecture group engaged RCG to provide an assessment of their architectural direction in support of Customer data and Master Data Management.

To fully support the company’s business strategy in the quickest and most cost-effective manner, the Enterprise Architecture approach must be cohesive, align business needs, technical methods, and organizational policies, practices, and procedures, and deliver into an enterprise-wide capability rather than one that is application focused.

The Final Results

RCG provided the company with actionable recommendations and an action plan to achieve:

• Future Enterprise Architecture Framework
• Future Framework for Master Data Hub
• Future Managed Data Environment Framework
• Future BI/Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture