Newly-merged organization gains standardized metrics, dashboard prototypes, and road map for data warehouse implementation
Business Challenge
During the height of the domestic mortgage crisis of 2008/2009, one of the largest financial services companies in the U.S. began an acquisition that included acquiring a mortgage division with a portfolio of more than $100 billion. As a result of the challenges involved in merging two organizations, the management team was working to standardize the way they measured the effectiveness of the business. Defining a business intelligence strategy became key to making critical business decisions. This spurred the team to set some standard metrics across the organization to gain insight into operations and reduce risk in the decision making process.
The CEO and his direct reports made the decision to engage CSI, leveraging its depth of experience in mergers and process optimization, as well as expertise in information management solutions.
CSI Solution
CSI brings two decades of in-depth experience in process optimization and information management, with subject matter experts both in business practices in the mortgage industry as well as technologies. CSI’s unique methodology for information management solutions incorporates a process-centric approach to the use of technology. Leveraging a deep understanding of the challenges organizations face in an integration effort, CSI worked with the CEO and his team using a two-phased approach to addressing their information needs.
Phase 1 included facilitated sessions with key management and stakeholders to identify and document the business requirements and key metrics needed to truly gauge the health of the business. What is unique about these facilitated sessions versus a standard interview process is identifying and understanding the business processes behind those metrics, as well as all the contributors to those processes.
This is conducted with stakeholders across functional lines of business allowing for consensus on key metrics that support corporate strategy — gaining critical insight into the information that would truly provide knowledge to the management team. Using tools like SIPOC diagrams to identify process pain points in conjunction with the facilitated sessions, CSI was able to create prototype dashboards directly from these sessions. This gave key stakeholders who would use that information the ability to refine, enhance and approve those dashboards without the costly process of connecting to live data and implementing numerous changes post-build.
Using tools like SAP BusinessObjects’ Xcelsius, source-to-target template and magic quadrants, the CSI team was able to build functional dashboard prototypes leveraging existing data, as well as identify and prioritize additional data the organization needed to gain insight into its business, creating a comprehensive road map for the organization to use in building and implementing its data warehouse. The prototype dashboards will be connected to live data using OBIEE once the back-end work is completed in Phase 2 Build.
Return on Investment
Phase 1 was successful for the client management team, driving out the most actionable metrics, ensuring consensus among the team for managing the business. Using this approach, CSI is saving the client multiple iterations of rework post-build of their data warehouse. This is accomplished by solidifying requirements in the form of dashboard prototypes so users know — up front — what they will receive at the end of the data warehouse project. This produces a perpetual return on investment over the life of the data warehouse.
Based on this success, and the comprehensive road map created for the data warehouse implementation, the client engaged CSI for the Build Phase of the project.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR PROCESS-CENTRIC APPROACH TO DASHBOARD IMPLEMENTATIONS, REGISTER TO DOWNLOAD OUR ON-DEMAND WEBCAST: Putting the Business Back Into Business Intelligence.
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