Business Intelligence

Situation

solūt was approached by a client who was looking for help to understand their current application environment, as well as providing support to their staff regarding reporting and documentation of their systems. The consequences of having an environment that was not fully understood meant more outages, duplicated efforts, testing in live environments, users going without access to crucial systems, and much more. The organization turned to us to help with this situation.

solūt’s Process

Since the scope was quite large, we broke the tasks down into several projects that was prioritized based on urgency.

• First, we got oriented with the business. Between looking at the current documentation, reviewing the applications, and interviews with stakeholders, we became familiar with the environment at hand.
• We then created a service catalog of all IT vendors, and how they were tied to the business. This allows us to see exactly what has is being used, possible warning signs in certain systems, and helped with the future IT budget creation.
• Next, we reviewed the data. The information flowing from one system to the other and the backend databases. This spurred on a data conversion for an application, implementing database maintenance plans, and archival of old legacy applications.
• We then moved forward with mapping out how all the applications were tied together and how the business flowed through them. This give great insight into many of the applications and allowed for thorough documentation, as well as showing certain gaps of knowledge in areas of the business.
• Finally, using our now in-depth knowledge on the systems, and the data at hand, we identified areas of frustration for the business. In this case, we created an inventory of reports to help better manage assets, and how they change throughout the system. This has helped identify and correct missing transactions, and give a better understand where there was failing in some of their business processes.

Resolution

solūt helped the client recover quickly to a more stable environment. This included a data review, documentation of all applications, assigning ownership of roles within these applications, naming convention standardization throughout the organization, and BI reporting on crucial business needs. We continue to help the client through new software projects, maintenance plans for application speed, and long-term strategy planning. The client continues to rely on solūt for IT guidance, training and expertise.