Something many people don’t realize is that BI tool proliferation is a symptom of a really good thing – people want to be data driven. They are trying to do whatever they can to get the information they need to execute at a higher level.

While it is the symptom of something great, it’s still an undesirable situation. It leads to ungoverned data with many people reporting on the same metric but getting different numbers, additional costs, an untenable support situation, and many, many other challenges.

In our work with hundreds of healthcare organizations across the nation, we’ve found there are two approaches to driving a conversion or consolidation:

1. Executive Mandate: the most common approach. Leadership understand the challenges and costs of having many tools and wants to convert / consolidate to one standard as much as possible.
2. IT Directive: less common, but not unheard of. In this scenario IT are driving the conversion / consolidation in order to provide better support, higher performance, and greater data trust.

Both are legitimate approaches, and Prominence’s proven process for converting / consolidating on a primary platform works for both (with minor tweaks). Here’s how we’ve successfully helped organizations with this transformative work:

Roadmap

In this phase we learn your current state of development practices, tools, stakeholders, users, etc., and establish the target future state. This includes finalizing the set of tools for data prep and visualization, and establishing development best practices to adhere to during the conversion/consolidation process. We’ll also prioritize assets to convert, review data dependencies to find heaviest use data sets, and review user distribution and security. The result: a roadmap that clearly outlines the steps to take, roles involved, and processes to follow to ensure a smooth transition.

Plan

At this time we work with you to identify and document key stakeholders, sponsors and SMEs involved in existing analytics and BI tools. Working with these staff, we compile metric definitions for conversion and ensure that any duplicate metrics are normalized to provide trusted information to all consumers. We’ll also work with your team to create an enterprise data structure and optimize development practices to ensure a successful transition.

Develop

During this phase the rubber meets the road. Data pipelines are built and transformations constructed based on documentation from the previous phase. The re-usable metrics and dimensions are re-used across data models that feed visualizations. The re-use of metrics ensures that people accessing different dashboards that contain the same metric see the same number – building trust and literacy. Additionally, the new visualizations built are refined from what consumers previously had to be easier to use and provide more relevant information, thus making them substantially better than what they were using before.

Deploy

Finally, the new solutions are configured for users and security and deployed after sign-off is obtained from stakeholders. During this time, additional education and adoption activities are conducted to ensure users can rapidly adopt the new solution and integrate into their workflows to drive the best possible actions.

The results? Our customers are able to not only convert / consolidate to an enterprise BI platform, but they also improve their analytics capabilities as well. It’s not just ‘lift-and-shift’, but forward progress toward organizational goals as well.

Some specific outcomes include:

• 100% governed, re-usable metrics and dimensions
• $300k+ saved on license fees (on average)
• 247 new global metrics established (on average)
• 4x increase in ability to deliver solutions with no increase in staff

If you’re ready to get your your arms around the BI tools in use and how data is distributed, contact Prominence and we’ll set up a short, no-strings conversations with one of our experts!