A Development Team of Experienced Professionals

Supplying a full complement of data warehouse design and implementation skills

The Data Warehouse Build service puts an experienced Baseline team at the helm to design and build your data warehouse, or reengineer an existing one. Baseline brings a full complement of skills to your data warehouse engagement, while preparing your internal team to own the development processes and production environment in the long term.

Baseline professionals are seasoned data warehouse implementation experts, experienced in all the major vendor platforms and tools, and equipped with the following skills: project management, requirements gathering, data and metadata design, data profiling and cleansing, data acquisition and loading, ETL programming, database administration (DBA), application development and testing, and system deployment.

Our professionals serve as your development team to achieve fast turnaround for data warehouse delivery to end-users, according to their requirements and expectations.

» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline

Your Challenges

• Business urgency and quick turnaround
• Operational systems often getting priority for IT resources
• Obtaining specialized skills required for data warehouse development
• Adapting existing SDLC methodologies to atypical data warehouse processes
• Betting on future value
• Limiting risk
• Committing to long-term investment in a strategic infrastructure

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The Problem

A complex system that raises high business expectations, challenges IT resources, and requires atypical development methods

Today, data warehouses are considered standard components of most companies’ information technology architecture. The data warehouse serves a business community in constant need of information in order to achieve strategic objectives and increase operational efficiencies. It supports a multitude of critical applications—from customer segmentation to demand forecasting, from customer retention to lifecycle analysis, from inventory analysis to performance dashboards.

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics has meant nothing short of strategic advantage for many companies. For others, competitive pressures, regulatory forces, or customer attrition rates mandate business intelligence solutions before it’s too late.

Yet, it’s no secret: data warehouse development and delivery continue to cause trouble for developers and business users alike. Promises are made; expectations are set; and, the value of the deliverable is questioned.

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The Baseline Approach

Using Baseline’s Data Warehouse Framework—a proven best practice

Each Data Warehouse Build engagement leverages our proprietary best practices methodology, The Baseline Data Warehouse Framework, for design, development and delivery.

• Our approach adheres to the following best practices:
• Business-driven development
• Joint business and IT accountability
• Baseline’s unique three-step requirements gathering process
• Baseline’s industry-leading BI Application Portfolio selection and prioritization process
• Iterative projects scoped to deliver new business value every 9-12 weeks.
• Adoption of data management processes, such as metadata, data quality, and data stewardship.
• Data warehouse lifecycle development process, a Baseline best practice approach.
• Built-in business-driven success metrics.
• Organizational structures, roles, and business/IT alignment for a sustained and self-sufficient data warehouse program.

Data Warehouse Development Process

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Your Value

A working data warehouse, a permanent development process, and tangible business benefit

In many ways, the Data Warehouse Build service functions as your insurance policy against project failure. By retaining Baseline, you watch an experienced team in action who incorporates best practice delivery principles right from the start.

With our implicit approach of “working together when possible, transferring knowledge always,” Baseline prepares your internal team to own the data warehouse development process for the long-term. IT teams can gauge their weaknesses and determine training and staff needs. Business end-users and managers learn what it takes to implement such a complex system and can participate in its development without second-guessing their IT counterparts.

The entire engagement concludes with a “Lessons Learned” session that can help your company avoid past mistakes and leverage development best practices in the future. Baseline ensures that you gain the necessary development expertise and techniques to be self-sufficient after we leave.

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Why Baseline

Unparalleled experience building business-driven data warehouses—on-time, on-budget, with high user adoption rates

Our professional consultants have been building data warehouses for over 15 years—some of the largest and most complex in the world. We have worked with companies of all sizes, across all industries, to plan and deliver every phase of hundreds of data warehouse development efforts. We bundle the right skills at the right time into our project team to deliver a data warehouse that is on-time and within budget.

We work with you to tailor the data warehouse development effort around the following parameters:

• Business users to be interviewed and requirements to be gathered.
• Incumbent tools to be used for development or new tools to be chosen.
• Use of offshore resources for development and a structured method to manage them onshore.
• Metadata as a core development component the first time out.
• Enterprise- or department-focused application delivery.
• Commitment to scope and timeline management overrides change requests.
• End-users training.
• Prototyping as the best delivery approach.
• Using Baseline expertise to help define new roles and interview new hires.

Unlike our competitors who focus primarily on implementing tools or acquiring and loading data to a platform, Baseline uses the Data Warehouse Build service to make you self-sufficient. We leave behind structured business analysis, annotated models, comprehensive metadata, documented code, and proven development processes that you need to sustain your data warehouse program long term.

In other words, when we leave, you have a working data warehouse—and a working development process and team—that delivers tangible value to your business.

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