Business Intelligence

Most organisations have multiple business applications to support the operational activity of the business creating significant amount of data. Harnessing this data to deliver information can be a complex and difficult task without business intelligence (BI) capability.

BI provides the 'window into the information' through balanced scorecards, performance reporting, advanced visualisation, data mining, predictive modelling techniques and many others.

It ensures that the right people have the right information, of the right quality, in the right format, at the right time, at the right cost. It helps provide a consistent view across the organisation, and supports the timely identification and resolution of business issues.

BI also provides advanced information distribution capabilities to proactively and reactively distributes the information, for example, through BI Portals, Email, SMS and more.

Acuma has an extensive understanding of BI solution definition, development and deployment. As an integral part of our methodology, we have successfully delivered BI solutions using all of the leading and many niche BI toolsets, we constantly research & develop our understanding of new BI products. Acuma can provide a comprehensive and proven BI delivery capability.

Data Warehousing

A Data Warehouse (DW) provides the secure, consolidated, and integrated information repository necessary for effect information reporting. It brings together the right information across organisational boundaries to ensure there is a 'single version of the truth' and trusted information is available at the right time to support effective business intelligence. A significant challenge when designing this type of environment is to ensure that it is flexible and responsive to change.

A data warehouse is not necessarily a single database, we think more in terms of a managed environment that supports both large scale enterprise data warehouse repositories and smaller focused data marts required for specific types of analysis such as data mining, and departmental reporting.

Acuma has extensive experience of building data warehouse solutions using all of the leading database toolsets.

Acuma has developed a data warehouse development and deployment methodology. This incorporates an iterative design and development approach that has proven to be a very successful.

This approach recognises two key characteristics of data warehouse projects that otherwise tend to cause major risk:

• First, the data used to populate data warehouse tends to be of highly variable quality. Whilst a lot can be done to resolve quality issues in advance, new issues inevitably emerge during development.
• Second, users often find it difficult to precisely define requirements prior to working with prototype output.