Business Intelligence Team Paper

Our Business Intelligence team has been asked by the Senior Staff to assess our current business system landscape against emerging trends in information delivery and dashboard design, and to make a recommendation for technologies that we should pursue as the next phase of our information and analytics (“BI&A”) evolution. Our team has been asked to summarize our recommendations into this executive memorandum.

Further, we have been given a $25,000 budget to do in-depth research, implement a proof-of-concept and scope a real-world implementation.

Current State of our Business System Landscape

Our company initiated the Business Intelligence team in 2013 to modernize our business system landscape with the intent of reducing costs, increasing information

 Phase 2: Centralization of on-premises data-marts into a single data warehouse and common reporting layer (internally developed MSSQL/SRSS/MS OLAP data services).

 Phase 3: Transition from on-premises applications to industry accepted SaaS (Software as a

Service) applications including Salesforce.com (CRM), Adaptive Planning (CPM), JIRA

(SDLC PMO), and Confluence (WIKI).

 Phase 4: Cloud based API integration of SaaS systems for bi-directional information availability and cross-department data correlation.

At this stage in our BI&A evolution, functional departments are well served by highly functional and specialized applications for their internal objectives, key data is integrated and rationalized, and executives have “two-level deep” access to key performance metrics and indices with at least one level of supporting information

(reports) for these indices. We have seen a dramatic improvement in the availability and relevance of business critical information in our enterprise. Regardless, there is room for improvement. PAGE 2

Challenges with the Current State of our Business System

Additionally, we find the presentation quality of the reporting and dashboard tools in our SaaS applications to be lacking relative to current dashboard design trends, aesthetic appeal, available tool and layout options. These SaaS applications solve both transaction and reporting challenges and are thus not specialized on data-mining and presentation.

Cloud Analytics

To date, our team has attempted to deliver cross-SaaS platform analytics through cloud API integration for bi-directional data availability to the SaaS platforms. This allows for improved value-stream information presence. It still relies, however, on complex integration, the SaaS platforms’ built-in dashboard tools, and custom development where those tools are limited.

We see two major areas of innovation in technology that we should investigate to evolve past these challenges. The first deals with SaaS information availability without the need for centralized data-warehouses or the internal maintenance of complex cloud

API integrations. This is described as the “democratization” of cloud data (Tableau

2016). The second area of innovation deals with advances in cloud dashboard toolsets and design trends (FusionCharts 2016). These tools go beyond basic