Business Intelligence Foundation for Growth

A large wealth management company was launching an aggressive growth plan targeting doubling assets under management within two years.  A cornerstone of that growth effort was a robust data and analytics capability that the current infrastructure could not provide.

Overview

Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) and reporting were identified as necessities to help the company meet its goals. As a result, they embarked on a strategic project to review and assess the capabilities of its current data warehouse environment, compare it to leading practices and develop a roadmap and architecture to support its next-generation data warehouse.

Strategy and Goals

The client had established an aggressive time schedule, and RCG stepped up to the plate by immediately bringing together a team of experts with extensive experience in the client’s BI platforms. Initially, RCG utilized its data warehouse methodology to develop detailed questionnaires to review the different aspects of the data warehouse environment.

The review covered the roles and responsibilities of the IT organization in respect of the data warehouse; business areas supported by the data warehouse; documentation of issues, logical and physical data architecture; data management and Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) process; operational data sources and integration needs; BI and reporting standards; practices and processes used for development.

Based on the information gathered, RCG completed a comprehensive analysis of the system’s current state and identified gaps based on industry-leading practices. The client’s strategic vision and expectations of the future data warehouse were captured through visioning sessions. The gap analysis, combined with the data gathered in the visioning sessions, was the source for designing the roadmap and future state architecture.

The Final Results

The final report provided the basis for developing the strategic data warehouse. In addition, the client was able to develop a plan which included resource planning and investments in tools and technologies.

The assessment and roadmap were so successful, that the client outsourced its EBI/DW operations to RCG for a period of three years. RCG is providing thought leadership in data integration and BI and mentoring, best practices and knowledge transfer to the client’s staff, who will eventually assume operational responsibility for the data warehouse.

The Conclusion

The assessment yielded immediate benefits by listing a number of ‘quick hit’ tactical projects that RCG had identified as providing immediate value. This included consolidating the number of databases and implementing a governance structure to better manage the data warehouse environment. Improvements in report design provided added functionality, such as drill-down to detail account information and campaign analysis.