Founding a not-for-profit arts and entertainment organization -- and building it into a recognized and valued contributor to the local community.
Taking a company of two, with virtually no revenue, and growing it into a multi-million dollar consulting firm employing over twenty.
Taking the reigns of a foundering education services firm and expanding it from its home base to three new offices in two other states and into Europe.
I build businesses, from scratch or early in their development, grow them, and make them recognized successes in their industry.
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| Expertise: Business Intelligence |
Business intelligence (BI) has been a persistent and deep-rooted theme throughout my career.
I'm experienced and skilled at locating, gathering, organizing, and managing business information, but more importantly understanding how to organize and deliver business intelligence to information consumers in a way that bears directly on concrete business needs.
Over the past eleven years I've been a partner and COO of a BI firm whose success has resulted from the application of these skills and from building an organization to deliver timely, high quality, actionable information in ways that are immediately relevant to business decision-making.
Experienced with Cognos PowerPlay and Impromptu, Microstrategy, Visual Crossing, Applix, Information Builders, Microsoft Access and SQL Server.
In Depth
See below for some of the Business Intelligence Lessons I've learned.
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Business Intelligence Lessons
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| Context
In the course of building a leading BI provider and consulting firm from startup to industry success, being Director of Market Research at the Aetna, overseeing the design, installation and use of I/T network and web applications providing critical BI to users and decision-makers, I've learned how to understand business user needs and deliver the tools they need to make better decisions.
Following are a few of the key lessons I've learned along the way about BI.
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Establish a BI Center of Excellence. The companies with the best BI are those that have established a BI Center of Excellence. The mission of a BICoE should be:
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Evangelize BI and provide BI leadership to the enterprise
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Develop, in collaboration with key stakeholders, the company's BI Vision
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Chair the BI Stakeholders Advisory Council
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Develop and implement BI strategy
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Establish and maintain enterprise data model, including entity-relationship diagrams, metadata, data flow maps, and definition of KPIs
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Establish, update and enforce data quality standards
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Advocate modifications to current data (internal and external) acquisition processes
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Understand and document user BI needs
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Provide BI training and skills development
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Provide BI consulting and support services
Consultative, Service Model. BI is best delivered on a consultative service model as opposed to the all-too-common utility model.
Understand the Data. This does NOT mean being able to reel-off a bunch of acronyms of operational data systems or being able to flow chart how data gets captured, stored, moved and transformed through ETL processes, or identify which DBs are relational and which dimensional. That shows an understanding of the I/T, but no understanding of the data and what it means.
Understanding the data means understanding it from a business perspective. For example, if the data is premium data, knowing whether the premiums are written or earned; whether the premium numbers are before or after auditing adjustments for premium increases or returns; knowing if the numbers are for both new and renewal business; knowing whether the premium data represents the premiums of the entire account or just one division or operating location of the insured -- and so forth.
Understanding the data your BI applications deliver to end users is the best way to gain access to end users, build trust with them, and discover new opportunities to deliver even more BI value. To this end, a BICoE should support end users with a data help desk where users can call when they have questions about the data they are getting, about what it means, and how to use it. Hold periodic training sessions to acquaint new users and reacquaint experienced users with the data and to educate users in analysis techniques.
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