Data Warehousing and Information Architecture Practices

BPM maintains specialty practices in Data Warehousing and Information Architecture. These are dedicated to improving clients’ business performance by leveraging mission-critical information assets (both structured and unstructured). Such information assets may exist, lying dormant, in silos across the enterprise. They can be brought to life if organized, integrated, cleansed, reconciled, and/or aggregated, and then made available to serve key business processes and constituencies in a timely way. BPM has a concentrated practice in precisely this service. Recent examples of our consultant experiences in this area include:  

• Designed and Developed a Data Warehouse/BI Infrastructure for a membership-based industry association. The purpose was to define the (a) a business strategy including an ROI analysis based on time-motion studies to justify the initiative, (b) business requirements and priorities yielding a phased implementation strategy and organizational change management plan, (c) detailed information architecture and component design and tools selection, (d) multiple phases of implementation. 

• Designed and Developed an Information Quality and Data Warehouse Infrastructure for a student loan originator and servicer, to obtain competitively advantageous efficiencies in providing data to key decision makers and to reengineer business processes in support of rapid response to loan origination and servicing events.

• Developed a Data Warehousing Strategy for a stock exchange company. The purpose was to define the (a) Data Warehousing Framework (characteristics, architecture, principles, transformation, and  tools), (b) Support Processes (governance, data quality, development methodology), (c) Organizational Impact (roles and responsibilities, functional entities, and (d) Develop a Conceptual Data Model (in terms of subject areas).

• Designed and Implemented a National Intelligence BI System. Designed and implemented a BI system including advanced search and synthesis tools to provide access to intelligence data bases  Developed in conjunction with the US Intelligence Community,  the system accesses and manages both structured and unstructured data, incorporating natural language processing to interpret and serve up intelligence.

• Implemented a Near-Real-Time Data Warehouse for the Las Vegas gaming industry. The system incorporates advanced data warehousing technology integrated with e-CRM  to provide a knowledge management system for customer relationship management and fraud detection. 

• Contracted to provide a Enterprise Information Architect on a multi-million dollar global effort for Common Data Management.  This program had five work streams: Organizational Hierarchy Alignment, Core Business Terminology, Subject Area Inventory, Data Discovery & Cleansing, and Data Management.  The program had two main deliverables: (1) common business language (CBL), both in business terms and validated through an enterprise data model (the purpose of the CBL is to ensure common business definitions globally and alignment of those definitions to IT transactional systems Data Warehouse/Data Marts) and (2) clean data (whereby CBL helps define business rules necessary for high data quality). Managed the technical implementation team with overall responsibility for quality.

• Developed Data Warehouse Strategy and Systems for several financial services firms. Developed information models for the enterprise lines of business. Designed, developed and deployed large scale data management and data mart systems. Extensive experience with such tools as Oracle Erwin, Ab Initio ETL, Cognos, Micro Strategy, XML.

• Designed/Delivered Data Warehouse, BI and Data Quality Solutions for several Fortune 500 companies in the financial, pharmaceutical and industry association businesses. Also integrated into the solutions Web-based portals, document management, e-collaboration and workflow components.

• Data Base Performance Tuning projects. Typically achieved factors of 2-10 improvement in run-time and throughput. Projects performed for such firms as McKesson, the UK Health System, Farm Credit Canada, Capital One, CitiCorp, Verispan, Cable and Wireless, Verizon, MCI and others