Business Intelligence Assessment
Overview
To improve business processes and decision making, hospitals need access to relevant, purposeful data. Key to achieving this goal is successfully creating a Business Intelligence Platform that focuses on two key components: analytics and the requisite supporting data. While the analytics provide the reporting means for dashboards and scorecards, these reports are meaningless without a structurally sound data warehouse feeding up-to-date and relevant information.
At RSM McGladrey, our healthcare team has developed a Business Intelligence Assessment that establishes the foundation for developing a business intelligence platform. After analyzing your current environment, we work with you to create a blueprint that outlines the steps and processes involved in building a data warehouse with sound, relevant data to fulfill your information and reporting needs. The Business Intelligence Assessment incorporates a real-world, proven architecture that features a disciplined, rigorous approach enabling process-defined, high-level analysis.
Process and Results Driven
During the Business Intelligence Assessment, we perform the following necessary due-diligence to help insure success:
- Understand the business justification for your project
- Define source systems for foundational data and satellite data;
- Identify the process for extracting, transforming and loading foundation information;
- Identify potential infrastructure changes required (this does not include specific hardware and software selections);
- Develop a conceptual project plan that will define the resources and effort required to roll out a foundational data warehouse;
- Present a formal report of our findings that provides a framework for next steps.
Our process helps insure a thorough understanding of necessary steps for your business intelligence project. This foundation enables detailed scoping of your project, defines the commitment involved, and provides a clear vision of what will be accomplished.
Methodology Our Business Intelligence Platform methodology is a comprehensive set of activities, processes, deliverables and staffing requirements that are used to develop, implement and maintain a centralized information repository (data warehouse), associated business views (data marts) and in-depth analytics (business intelligence). We developed our methodology by working with clients engaged in business intelligence projects. We continue to refine our methodology as we learn new and improved methods for managing an organization’s information assets.
Lessons Learned There are many reasons organizations struggle with business intelligence projects. Some of the following may sound familiar to you:
- Lack of planning. Organizations fail to set reasonable goals and objectives or enact proper control measurements to identify when the project has strayed off course.
- Resource constraints. In many organizations, there isn’t a single person who understands the intricacies of all the systems. Having the right person available to answer questions about your data is critical to success.
- Limited access to data. With so many vendors involved, it becomes difficult to leverage the proprietary data structures to properly assess and access the information across your organization.
- Inability to deliver value to users. The ultimate goal can only be achieved if users incorporate the business intelligence solution into their jobs. The sooner the users see results, the faster it will be adopted.
Dave Chmielewski
Manager
402.344.6147
healthcare@rsmi.com
