Marketing Datamart for a Leading Best Practices Research Company

The Client

A leading provider of best practices research and analysis focusing on corporate strategy, operations and general management issues.

The client provides best practices research, decision-support tools, and executive education to a membership of the world’s leading corporations and not-for-profit institutions. Their research addresses issues related to corporate strategy, operations, and general management, and they focus on identifying management initiatives, processes, tools, and frame works that will allow their clients to avoid reinventing the wheel in addressing problems they share in common with their peers.

The Challenge

The client is a young company that is growing extremely fast. In order to sustain that desired growth, its business places an extremely tough demand on its Information Technology department to deliver marketing data in a timely fashion to the company’s business users.

The company desires to know not only what new opportunities are available in the marketplace, but also how their existing clients are utilizing the services the company provides. Currently, they have several applications in-house from which they desire to gather and analyze information. The ultimate goal for the IT department is to provide an enterprise view of its membership.

The Solution

Altek Solutions worked with the client's development team and key business users to analyze their Business Intelligence needs and determine the best solution for getting the business the data they required in a timely fashion.

The solution was a three step approach:

• Re-architect the Business Objects environment in order to provide more stability, ease the administration effort, and provide faster turnaround of report development
• Train the client's developers in best practices for Business Objects development & administration
• Design & implement a new data warehouse that would facilitate more efficient data analysis and trend forecasting by the business users

The Benefits

The changes that were implemented by the project team have resulted in the following improvements:

• The client’s IT staff has more control over the security of its Business Intelligence environment
• Business users are able to retrieve important marketing data when they need it
• Program managers have access to more detailed member utilization data, which allows them to make better marketing decisions
• Due to the development processes put into place, the client’s development staff is able to rapidly deliver on report and analysis requests

Tools & Technologies

• Business Objects & WebIntelligence
• Data Junction Cosmos
• ERWin Data Modeler
• MS SQLServer 2000
• Dimensional Data Mart Modeling
• Project Management