Entigence is a small and woman-owned business in the Commonwealth of Virginia and is authorized to do business on a GSA IT schedule.

We are proud to say that our design framework has provided repeated success to our clients. Our methodology is simple and logical. It is founded on one overriding principle: your business needs drive the strategies we will offer and the solution(s) that we will develop. Unlike other frameworks that pigeonhole you into a set way of creating solutions, our approach is flexible and ensures your success. Successful solutions are much more than implementing tools and technologies. We equate success with providing a value-added business intelligence environment to the user community. We believe that success is inevitable when the right tools and technologies are embedded within the right business context.

George Washington University is the largest institution of higher learning in the nation’s capital. Chartered by Congress in 1821, GW began as a college to develop educated clergy for the growing metropolitan area. GW now has eight major schools, offering hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and professional programs. According to the latest official figures, there are over 17,000 full-time and part-time students in fields as diverse as forensics, public health and museum education.

Information Systems and Services (ISS) is the university’s division responsible for the development and management of technology, across the entire enterprise. As part of its mission, ISS maintains an extensive inventory of hardware and software. Because multiple groups within ISS manage the assets, no single repository exists for maintaining information about the dynamics of hardware and software. Each ISS group may use a different method for making changes to, and reporting on, its inventory.

GW charged ISS with creating a system for tracking the hardware and software it owned and for monitoring changes to the inventory. The system ISS develops must be robust enough to eventually meet the needs of the entire university. It must also consider the reporting demands of ISS executives, who will use the information to make operational and strategic decisions.

ISS leadership assigned oversight of the initiative to the Technology Advisory and Strategy Committee (TASC), a cross-disciplinary group of ISS staff members. Directives were issued to gather requirements and draft high-level policies and methodologies. The ultimate goals were threefold: 1) prepare procedures for requesting changes to the hardware and software inventory, 2) develop a user interface for recording change requests and 3) design and code reports using the information captured in the change request system.  Entigence Corporation was hired to work with TASC and help support the planning process, coordinate some of the TASC assignments, make recommendations to strengthen the policies, procedures and designs and ensure that the metrics were aligned with the mission of ISS. Entigence lead the design and development of C3, an enterprise-level change management application that provided a metrics-based approach to management and streamlining of the processes and activities associated with any changes to hardware and software owned and managed by ISS.

ISS leadership assigned oversight of the initiative to the Technology Advisory and Strategy Committee (TASC), a cross-disciplinary group of ISS staff members. Directives were issued to gather requirements and draft high-level policies and methodologies. The ultimate goals were threefold: 1) prepare procedures for requesting changes to the hardware and software inventory, 2) develop a user interface for recording change requests and 3) design and code reports using the information captured in the change request system.  Entigence Corporation was hired to work with TASC and help support the planning process, coordinate some of the TASC assignments, make recommendations to strengthen the policies, procedures and designs and ensure that the metrics were aligned with the mission of ISS. Entigence lead the design and development of C3, an enterprise-level change management application that provided a metrics-based approach to management and streamlining of the processes and activities associated with any changes to hardware and software owned and managed by ISS.

Entigence has assisted the OCFO to enhance and maintain several vital applications.  Our consultants have provided process and functional support for budget formulation and budget execution processes, business intelligence, web development, database administration, Windows system administration, reporting system administration and report development services.  Among the highlights is providing support for:

• Compilation of the District’s operating budget and production of the annual budget book
• Compilation of the Capital budget and budget book production
• Design and development of the District’s financial data warehouse and development of key reports, multi-dimensional views, and executive dashboards to collect, track, and disseminate key performance metrics.

An executive dashboard with key performance indicators is available on the DC extranet at cfoinfo.dc.gov.  The Entigence team delivered the framework and content of this dashboard which recently received the equivalent of a “gold medal” from an industry watchdog for promoting transparency.

We are proud to say that this particular client considers us to be subject matter experts in their domains and relies on us for business process re-engineering efforts nearly as often as our other services.  Our deep understanding of their metrics, drivers of their metrics, and the integration of data from multiple underlying systems is paramount in our ability to deliver the metrics focus that the OCFO needs to cope with the constant scrutiny from the constituents of the District of Columbia Government.

Office of Sponsored Research

At Northwestern University, Entigence designed and implemented a platform for metrics-driven business intelligence deliverables for the Office of Sponsored Research (OSR).  OSR managed $400M in research grants in 2007 to support 90 school-based centers 20 university centers over two campuses.  In 2007, OSR implemented a COTS package for higher education research management.  This application was poorly documented with minimal database documentation.  Our consultants worked closely with OSR staff and system integrators to develop a sophisticated set of metrics, dimensional models and business processes to manage all aspects of proposals, awards, cost analysis, principal investigator analysis, trending, and standard and ad hoc reporting.  The end result – a functionally sophisticated metrics-based reporting platform – was extremely well-received by the user community.

Corporate Finance

Along with the OSR implementation, Entigence played a critical role in the implementation of the PeopleSoft Finance data warehouse called EPM.  It was generally accepted during the implementation of PeopleSoft Finance that a large part of “go-live” success was dependent on the success of a handful of extremely complex, highly-flexible, metrics-based enterprise reports.  Entigence took charge of designing and guiding the implementation of the necessary services to deliver the desired results.  Our knowledge and experience with higher education financial processes and commonly used metrics, commitment control, DW design best practices, Oracle and Cognos provided to be the winning combination in providing the user community with the level of sophistication and flexibility they required in these reports.

Following are statistics published by their CIO shortly after go-live.

• Transactions are flowing through the system and business is getting done at surprisingly high rates considering the number of changes with which the University community has had to contend.
• There are over 11,000 user ids in the new system.
• In six weeks after go-live, users entered over 6,000 requisitions, including 2,200 through the iBuyNU electronic marketplace and over 3,000 expense reports, providing reimbursement to almost 2,000 unique employees. As they closed the first month after go-live, at least one successful processing of each major interface had occurred and all of these data were accessed via the Cognos Business Intelligence tool.

Facilities Management

Entigence was engaged by Northwestern during the implementation of a facilities management application. Although initially brought on to create a reporting solution for the facilities data, we approached the problem with a metrics focus asking ourselves and Northwestern constituents what are the SLAs and drivers that impact business processes in this area.  From that understanding we developed the metrics and the ability to slice the metrics by a variety of business attributes to allow business users to perform the SLA-based services and reconciliation of asset finances with G/L functions.

Just like at Brown, our services at Northwestern were rooted in our focus on metrics.  For commitment control, a critical business function for managing finances effectively, our consultants became ingrained in the processes in order to develop the operational metrics that the university would benefit from.  We then methodically used the technologies to our benefit to deliver not just the metrics but an integrated platform to support tracking of the metrics and reviewing the underlying transactions that affected the metrics.

Designed and implemented an admissions data warehouse for undergraduate and graduate student admissions.  This initiative was of strategic importance to the University given competitive pressures related to admissions.  Designed and created cubes for measuring key performance metrics in Cognos for admissions data using a variety of related business attributes.   Working closely with University admissions and IT we designed a series of drill through reports using Report Studio to analyze the details behind the aggregates underlying the metrics.  The data warehouse extracted data from the SunGuard Banner product suite.  Cognos dimensional models were customized to allow the design and development of enterprise-level standardized or managed reports along with a robust ad hoc reporting environment.    Entigence assisted with requirements gathering, design, and development of reports and cubes.

Although at first glance, this engagement may present itself as an IT implementation, the nature of the business processes and stakeholders actually made this an extremely performance-driven exercise.  The Ivy League universities, as it is well known in the industry, are very competitive and vie for the same pool of highly-qualified candidates.  In this climate, every initiative is keenly driven by inherent ROI focus primarily in terms of effectiveness.  Business users are extremely driven by this focus and are very demanding of all business intelligence deliverables from the point of view of operational metrics.

In our work with the IT organization, we maintained the metrics-focus and delivered requirements that were insightful and a framework for business intelligence that the client found very valuable.

A quote from then-Deputy CIO is presented below:

“Entigence’s methodologies and approach for business requirements will have a long-term and positive impact on our team.”

• Assistant Vice-President and Deputy CIO, Administrative Information Systems

Conducted a strategic analysis of University of Chicago administrative systems environment related to data access and reporting, as well as industry and peer best practices for data warehousing/business intelligence.  This resulted in a set of plans and strategies for their in-house  Business Information Services (BIS) division.  The plans included timeframes for enterprise research administration (ERA), student reporting, budget and staffing to support implementation of ERA and student subject areas, organization structure, high-level architecture diagrams based on review of existing reporting silos,  training strategy, security recommendations for reporting including scenarios and trade-offs, and ETL strategy based on standards used during Sybase to Oracle conversion.

From a performance management perspective, this engagement is more focused on IT processes and enrollment management processes.  Quality and effectiveness metrics for models, applications, and service-orientation for information delivery were reviewed by us as part of the deliverables.

At Georgetown University, Entigence is currently implementing a metrics-drive business intelligence platform to manage the entire student lifecycle from recruitment to graduation.  Georgetown’s reporting project was implemented in tandem with a large-scale, enterprise-wide replacement initiative of their student system.  Legacy applications were replaced with the Banner suite from SunGuard.  Like Northwestern, Georgetown executives were cognizant that the Banner go-live was heavily dependent on the success of the business intelligence and metrics rollout.

Entigence Corporation was brought onboard to architect and deliver a comprehensive reporting ”portal” for the user community.  The project approach of a 3-tier delivery model – start with aggregate analysis, drill down to the primary details and then drill down to the secondary details – was a “hit”.  Users loved the consistency this approach provided in navigating the enormous amount of data in Banner.  100+ metrics and reports were delivered at go-live and the demand for additional reports continues several months after go-live.  Reports have been showcased in meetings with senior Georgetown executives on several occasions.

For each business area, our focus was on the core metrics required by the constituents and maximizing the flexibility to track the metrics given the underlying applications.  Operational metrics and reports for the following business areas were part of our engagement:

• Recruitment and Admissions
• Registration and Enrollment
• Student Accounts
• Student Health
• Financial Aid

One of the highlights of our engagement was the creative way in which we assisted the Registrar’s office in transitioning from a manual- and paper-based course scheduling processes to a Cognos-Word based electronic process.  We created reports to produce one page reports for every course offering for a particular term.  These PDFs were automatically parsed by a PDF-to-Word converter and the resultant Word documents were put on a shared network site with tracking turned on.  Departments across the University edited their course offerings and saved final copies of the Word documents in a new location for the Registrar’s office to pick up and process through Banner.

This engagement highlights the versatility with which we are able to navigate executive focus, business processes, performance management, and systems implementation in a cross-functional, integrated, and effective manner.

We are currently engaged with a publicly-traded University experiencing significant growth.  Retained by the executive team to design and create executive metrics for each business area so that cross-functional analysis to support the strategic vision is achieved by the executives on an as-needed basis in a timely and accurate manner.  Business processes include:

• Marketing: lead and conversion analysis.  Cross-functional analysis of marketing representatives through the life cycle of the student to ensure the quality of the leads through to graduation.  Metrics management for actual versus budget for marketing overall costs and costs per lead and headcounts.  In a future phase, advertising spend analysis and metrics will be addressed.
• Admissions:  Metrics for managing the admission of new recruits, and marketing to existing students to ensure continuity to graduation.  Score carding and dashboarding against targets.
• Enrollment Management:  Designing dashboards and metrics for all aspects of enrollment management and measuring productivity by all relevant business attributes in a manner that is tightly integrated with marketing and admissions processes.
• Student Accounts and Student Support:  Metrics for accounts receivables to support quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year comparison of collections and balances.  Cross-functional metrics for enrollment and student accounts to support forecasting and growth management.
• Legal and Institutional Research:  Metrics and reports for meeting compliance regulations set forth by accreditation agencies and state and local jurisdictions in 50 states of the US.

Our services at this University are comprehensive:  from delivering a core set of metrics that are relevant and based in best-practices to the implementation of the IT functionality to support cutting across multiple applications to deliver the expected results and framework to the stakeholders.  This high visibility project is being monitored at the highest levels in the organization since executives have invested financial and HR capital to ensure that the resultant platforms allow the organization to be metrics-driven in a top-down approach down to the lowest levels in the organization.

• Preparation of procedures for requesting changes to the hardware and software inventory,
• Development of a user interface for recording change requests, and
• Design reports using the information captured in the change request system.

Entigence led the design and development of C3, an enterprise-level change management application that provided a metrics-based approach to management and streamlining of the processes and activities associated with any changes to hardware and software owned and managed by ISS.  C3 was adopted by users with resounding success.  Entigence’s unique approach of cataloging hardware and software assets in a logical manner proved to be a critical success factor.

The following are statistics published by the CIO of an organization shortly after go-live:

• Transactions are flowing through the system and business is getting done at surprisingly high rates considering the number of changes with which the organization has had to contend.  There are over 11,000 user IDs in the new system.
• In six weeks after go-live, users entered over 6,000 requisitions, including 2,200 through the electronic marketplace and over 3,000 expense reports, providing reimbursement to almost 2,000 unique employees.  As we closed the first month after go-live, at least one successful processing of each major interface had occurred and all of these data were accessed via the Cognos Business Intelligence tool.

We are able to assist our clients with the use of Net Promoter Scores (NPS) in the collection and analysis of data using business units, marketing attributes, bio-demo data and other business attributes.  Through statistical tools and methodologies, we assist the client assess the relationship between NPA and its drivers.

We conduct strategic analyses of administrative systems with respect to enterprise-level data access and reporting.  These analyses have yielded plans and strategies that include the following:

• Timeframes for enterprise research administration and student reporting,
• Budget, staffing and organizational structure to support these initiatives,
• High-level architecture diagrams based on review of existing reporting areas,
• Training strategies,
• Security recommendations for reporting including scenarios and trade-offs,
• ETL strategy based on standards used during Sybase-to-Oracle conversion

Quality and effectiveness metrics for models and applications, as well as service-orientation for information delivery are reviewed by us as part of the deliverables.

George Washington University is the largest institution of higher learning in the nation’s capital. Chartered by Congress in 1821, GW began as a college to develop educated clergy for the growing metropolitan area. GW now has eight major schools, offering hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and professional programs. According to the latest official figures, there are over 17,000 full-time and part-time students in fields as diverse as forensics, public health and museum education.

Information Systems and Services (ISS) is the university’s division responsible for the development and management of technology, across the entire enterprise. As part of its mission, ISS maintains an extensive inventory of hardware and software. Because multiple groups within ISS manage the assets, no single repository exists for maintaining information about the dynamics of hardware and software. Each ISS group  may use a different method for making changes to, and reporting on, its inventory.

GW charged ISS with creating a system for tracking the hardware and software it owned and for monitoring changes to the inventory. The system ISS develops must be robust enough to eventually meet the needs of the entire university. It must also consider the reporting demands of ISS executives, who will use the information to make operational and strategic decisions.

ISS leadership assigned oversight of the initiative to the Technology Advisory and Strategy Committee (TASC), a cross-disciplinary group of ISS staff members. Directives were issued to gather requirements and draft high-level policies and methodologies. The ultimate goals were threefold: 1) Prepare procedures for requesting changes to the hardware and software inventory, 2) Develop a user interface for recording change requests, and 3) Design and code reports using the information captured in the change request system.

Solution

Entigence Corporation was hired to work with TASC and help support the planning process, coordinate some of the TASC assignments, make recommendations to strengthen the policies, procedures and designs and ensure that the outputs were aligned with the mission of ISS. Entigence is currently leading the design and development of C3, an enterprise-level change management application that will streamline the processes and activities associated with any changes to hardware and software owned and managed by ISS.

Program Policy

Initially, Entigence met with an ISS director to review and critique the documentation prepared by each TASC committee prior to Entigence’s involvement. Entigence reviewed the meeting minutes, policy drafts,
screen shots of application interfaces and lists of hardware and software. It conducted interviews of key ISS personnel and became a regular participant in TASC meetings. After compiling and assessing that information, Entigence helped create a project plan that specified tasks and assigned resources.

Central to unifying the management of hardware and software was creating a comprehensive set of procedures for any action involving hardware or software. Entigence led the effort by breaking the analysis
into logical and manageable pieces, starting with policies, then processes and finally procedures. Entigence continued to advise ISS as it drafted policies and processes, keeping a focus on the concept of customer service, a priority element of the mission of ISS. Entigence worked within the ISS methodology to create practical guidelines for managing changes to hardware and software. Ultimately, ISS will employ a web- based application for technology users to request changes. Entigence has been supporting ISS in its effort to identify the data the application needs to capture and the types of reports ISS executives will want to see.

Entigence helped ISS develop a regular list of issues for resolution. A common issue for the TASC staff was  finding agreement on the definition of technological terms. Relying on its knowledge of ISS, gained from  previous projects, the Entigence team was able to provide expert advice that built consensus and kept the process moving forward.

Technical Advisory and Assistance Support

In order to manage the vast array of hardware and software, a system of categorizing and classifying must be created. Entigence made an extensive study of the different types of technology assets and made
recommendations for hardware and software hierarchies that would be acceptable enterprise-wide and provided a model for collecting, and reporting on, information.

Entigence made recommendations for creating data models that would match ISS requirements for capturing data and developing analytics for operational and strategic planning. This comprehensive view of the
hardware and software data also allowed Entigence to propose outlines for executive analyses and reports.

Enterprise Architecture Support

Entigence plays an important role as an impartial coordinator for the activities of ISS groups. Entigence brings a strong knowledge of the university’s information architecture and can advise ISS how changes in
their technology policies may affect their information architecture.

We used a very unique approach to capture all of ISS’ software tools and categorized them according to features and ranked them in terms of strength. This gave ISS managers a quick but comprehensive view of
a myriad software tools, some of whose functions were not clearly known. From this architecture view, ISS was able to determine which tools are going to be part of the enterprise’s core asset foundation and which will be retired or used in a limited way for specific functionality. In the long run this will save ISS money for annual maintenance of licenses while at the same time assist in instituting policies and procedures about the use of products.

Program Management and Required Meetings

Entigence maintains strong channels of communication with ISS, both formal and informal. Entigence meets weekly with a group that focuses on change management, as well as joining the weekly TASC meeting.
Using PowerPoint, Entigence keeps meeting minutes and uses them as a presentation tool and documentation to inform ISS. E-mail, phone calls and informal conferences are other methods Entigence
uses on a regular basis to communicate with ISS, assist in coordinating tasks and increase its knowledge of university programs.

Each week, Entigence also joins in other meeting of smaller groups within the TASC. Entigence frequently arranges, conducts and produces minutes for these meetings. Entigence also assists ISS executives with their presentations for meetings outside of ISS and the university, including education associations and other institutions of higher learning

Entigence has extensive experience in the management of resources for large projects and small. Entigence helped ISS determine what resources were available to work on the initiative and how the resources could
be coordinated.

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The George Washington University (GW) wanted to develop a more efficient means for accessing student and financial information, both for managing daily operations and performing high-level planning. GW’s Banner application recorded and retrieved student-related information, but was limited with respect to reporting features. Report creation was a time-consuming process that required staff with specialized training. Similarly, GW’s finance application’s reporting and analytical features were complex and required programmer intervention.

Entigence Corporation played an integral part in the design, development, testing, and rollout of a web- based business intelligence (BI) environment to improve access to mission critical information. We also led the effort to reengineer project related business processes – a critical factor in making GW’s BI project a resounding success.

GW’s BI environment has three components:

• Finance Cube and Drill Through Reports: These components are built directly from GW’s enterprise finance/accounting application, Oracle Financials. The cube contains information from the General Ledger and the drill-through reports allow actual vs. budget analysis of expenditure, encumbrance, budget, and projection dollars down to Accounts Payable (vendor, invoice) details as appropriate.
• Student Data Mart: This data mart focuses on a subset of GW’s student records: inquiries and applications from prospective students, enrollment and course registration of current and former   students, and student demographics.
• Student Accounts Data Mart: This data mart focuses on reporting and analysis of accounts receivables data in Banner and reconciliation of Banner information with Oracle Financials.

Finance Cubes and Drill Through Reports

The Finance Cube and Drill Through Reports allow GW’s IT departments to (expenditures, encumbrances) and projections for future spending against components are created directly from GW’s transaction application, Oracle attached to the production database and shows real-time data. Overheads warehouse were avoided in this implementation.

The cube shows monthly and YTD dollars and computes percent available and annualized expenses. It provides budget managers with a complete view of GW’s General Ledger for budget vs. actual analysis.From this cube, users are able to drill-through to detailed reports for expenditures, encumbrances, projections, and budgets. In addition, the cube aggregates dollar amounts by general ledger account and organization roll up groups that do not exist in Oracle Financials but are required for decision-making and analytical purposes.

Each expenditure amount can be analyzed by drilling through to the “Expenditure Details” drill-through report. This report shows the following:

• Effective date of each transaction
• Vendor name
• Invoice number
• Payables description (item paid for), and
• Net expenditure amount (debit – credit)

Encumbrance amounts can be analyzed by drilling through to the “Encumbrance Details” drill-through report  that shows the following:

• Beginning encumbrance balance for the fiscal year for each GL account
• All encumbrance incurred via POs (along with PO details such as vendor, number, description and amount),
• All encumbrance reductions incurred by invoice payments (along with invoice number and amount), and
• Remaining encumbrance (by document and net for the report)

The budget drill-through shows original budget details such as budget version, budgeted amount, and date and each revision to the budget thereafter. The projection drill-through shows projection amount and a
description for the projection.

Together these reports provide a comprehensive view of actual and budgetary dollars in a quick, one-stop, point-and-click environment that shields the users from the intricacies of Oracle Financials.

The drill-through reports have been set up so that users can schedule them to run at night for all organizations and accounts in their responsibility. This enables very efficient reporting and analytical processes since the reports are available in the users’ Cognos mailbox/newsbox on-demand.

Student Data Mart

The Student Data Mart encompasses six distinct subject areas:

• Student Applications
• Student Course Registration
• Student Enrollment
• Student Inquiries
• Student Test Scores

GW chose to create a data mart for student information in order to allow users to do high-volume trend analysis in an efficient manner. The creation of the data mart allowed us to create linkages among student entities, which weren’t readily available in Banner since there was no need for these linkages in the transaction application. Decision support requirements however forced a completely integrated view and the creation of the additional data linkages.

Specifically, the data mart enables its users to:

• Quickly and easily locate counts of student inquiries, applications, enrollments and course registrations going back to 1992.
• Develop customized reports in a fraction of the time that it took using the source application.
• Effortlessly change the view of the data, among a multitude of dimensions, and drill-through from high-level views (such as College) to low-level views (such as Major).
• Create mailing labels to contact students or prospective students from the results of a standard report.
• Receive refreshed data on a weekly basis.

Student Accounts Data Mart

Subsequent to the creation of the student data mart, GW business users wanted to re-engineer the accounts receivables business process with particular focus on collection of third party receivables. Third parties are corporations or government organizations who pay for their employees to take courses at GW. In order to  cross-walk receivables from students to the appropriate third parties and to link these receivables back to the student or to a collection agency beyond a certain time period required specific views of the data which Banner screens did not provide easily. With the creation of the student accounts data mart, Entigence assisted GW in achieving an integrated view of all receivables – from the time it is incurred by a student to the time it is collected from the student, third party, or a collection agency.

Prior to the data mart, GW business users were making these linkages manually by tracking paper documents. Since the implementation of the data mart, all reporting and analytic activities are conducted through Cognos cubes and drill-through reports in the data mart. GW estimates that in the first semesters after the implementation of the student accounts data mart, collections have improved in a significant manner, providing a strong justification for the investment into the data mart.

Technical Details

In addition to the creation of the Cognos catalogs, cubes, drill through reports, standard reports, and data marts, Entigence corporation also assisted in the design and implementation of a Data Mart website and
comprehensive user and technical documentation for the system. Since the project team developed the solution using Internet standards, the system will be able to support expected growth targets with minimal
additional investment.

Informatica’s PowerMart product suite for the extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) process (for data mart refreshes) and Cognos’ Series 7 product suite (for all reports and cubes) were used in this project. The data mart target database was created using an Oracle 8 relational database management system (RDBMS). The gateway to the data mart was Cognos Upfront portal. The back-end servers are Sun/Solaris and Windows NT/2000.

GW’s Business Intelligence environment is accessed via a secure intranet; a firewall protects the network from unauthorized access. Data access is controlled by Cognos Access Manager, which allows system users to use a single logon to view all applications.

The District of Columbia (“District”) is a city with a clear vision – to be the best city in America and to be a full voting member of Congress. The mission of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) is to enhance the fiscal and financial stability, accountability and integrity of the Government of the District of Columbia. The OCFO has oversight and direct supervision of the city’s budget, and is responsible for collecting, controlling and accounting for more than $5 billion in annual operating and capital funds. Not least among its mandates are to forecast revenue, develop fiscal impact statements for proposed legislation, perform tax expenditure analyses, and provide advice on economic development matters. In order to carry out its mission, the OCFO invests considerable resources in technology for processing financial information.

Challenge

The OCFO manages a data warehouse environment that sources data directly from transaction databases and transforms the data into dimensional data models. Currently the data warehouse has three data marts accounting, purchasing, and fixed assets. The environment was designed so that users were able to create reports using desktop software that connected directly to the database.

The data warehouse environment was a success but began to have growing pains as usage expanded beyond the initial group of hardcore users. Using the data warehouse and the reporting software required a commitment from users in technological know-how, time and training. Many of the targeted new users only wanted information from a standard set of reports, and didn’t need the training to develop reports on the fly. Other users, new and continuing, needed more detailed analyses that could only be created by expert data warehouse analysts.

Solution

Entigence helped the OCFO implement a website (given the name CFO$ource) on its intranet that provides a single point of access for financial and budgetary information. CFO$ource contains readily available business analytics and financial metrics that all agencies use to monitor their agencies on a regular basis. CFO$ource was built using the Cognos suite of web-based products. Offering access via the web was important because it allowed many more users to retrieve information from the data warehouse by way of a browser on their desktops. Entigence created standard reports and customized applications for the OCFO, all published to folders on CFO$ource. Each user’s login information was tied to security that allowed access only to information that user was authorized to see. CFO$ource sources data from the following enterprise transaction applications: Accounting, Procurement, Fixed Assets and Spending Plan/Projection. To meet its vision, the District, like all other local governments, has to demonstrate responsible fiscal management. The Office of Chief Financial Officer (OCFO), among other responsibilities, develops and manages financial applications that allow the District to transact daily business. The OCFO also provides users with a comprehensive and integrated enterprise-view of financial data using a dimensionally modeled data warehouse to enable financial and program executives to make timely and accurate decisions. The OCFO data warehouse supports multi-year trend analyses and complex financial reporting for critical business processes such as the creation of the District’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR).

Program Policy Support

The creation of CFO$ource involved a shift in way that the OCFO provided information to its staff and customers. Entigence advised the OCFO on how to leverage the power of its existing data warehouse by employing web-based technology. In converting to a web-focused strategy, the OCFO could conserve IT support resources that formerly were needed to administer desktop applications and code specialized reports.

Entigence also assisted the OCFO in a joint project with the Office of Budget and Planning (OBP) to improve its budget control process. Entigence helped coordinate the communication between the two divisions and made recommendations that resulted in the design and implementation of a spending plan application to be hosted on CFO$ource.

Entigence assisted the OCFO with strategies to win buy-in from major stakeholders, such as the city council and the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. Entigence provided a technical review of documentation sent by the OCFO to other city agencies.

Technical Advisory and Assistance Support

Once the OCFO decided to build CFO$ource, Entigence prepared analyses, performed interviews and compiled technical specifications to support the requirements phase. Entigence helped the OCFO determine what hardware and software needed to be acquired and how these purchases would affect the state of its IT architecture.

Entigence was heavily involved in updating the data models and designing the specifications for the standard reports. Entigence made extensive inquiries to discern the data elements most commonly needed by financial executives and analysts, inside and outside of the OCFO.

The OCFO also asked Entigence to analyze, on a regular basis, the output of the data warehouse.

Among the resulting benefits:

1) Entigence helped design standard reports that compared totals from key general ledger accounts in both the data warehouse and the financial accounting system

2) Entigence recommended performance tuning measures that increased the speed of report processing

By utilizing dimensional modeling techniques, the financial data warehouse provides added value to District users. The DW extracts data programmatically and through Oracle drivers from mainframe and UNIX databases. Informatica’s PowerMart suite is used to structure, transform, and cleanse source data and insert/update the data into an Oracle database on the primary data warehouse server which is an IBM/AIX server. The warehouse is refreshed nightly. Several NT servers are used to house reporting and analytical software and a security management application. These enable users to view data via web browsers and desktop applications from Cognos Corporation (Impromptu, PowerPlay, Upfront). OCFO plans to rollout Cognos Query in the near future.

Planned enhancements include development of a budget projection application, integration of projections with actual’s in the data warehouse and a method to provide executives with a comprehensive view of the fiscal health of the city through an “executive dashboard.” Additional managed reports required for monthly closing and capital project management are planned, along with additional multi-dimensional views. The rollout of Cognos Query will be a significant enhancement to the data warehouse environment. It will remove the burden of managing desktop applications across the District and transition almost all report creation activities into the web environment.

Inclusion of business analytics in the data warehouse environment had two immediate benefits. Consistent, reliable and accurate metrics are readily available to all agencies in the District, and this in turn enables financial and program managers to react faster to unexpected trends, research the underlying cause of trends quickly, and ultimately put in place business
process changes at agencies which will bring variances back in line in a timely manner. Providing a robust  web-based interface to manage reports, multidimensional views, and applications was visionary – it will, in the near-term and long-term, reduce operational costs of managing hundreds if not thousands of desktops across the District. Using products from market leaders such as Oracle, Cognos, Informatica, and IBM will ensure that the OCFO’s data warehouse can scale quickly to meet the growing demands for reporting and analysis.

Developing cooperation between agencies that share responsibility for financial data and financial applications was a challenge that was overcome with strong executive sponsorship. The project’s high-level sponsors helped us gain and sustain cooperation.

Using technology to create innovative decision-support applications with ready-made business analytics is commonly found in the commercial sector. We consider the OCFO data warehouse project to be unique in that the agency realized that they too could leverage data warehouse and business intelligence applications to create, sustain, and manage business analytics to drive and improve financial management in the District. Additionally, the impetus for CFO$ource and managed reports came from the sponsors of the projects because they saw a need that could be fulfilled quickly with technologies that were already present in the District. This enabled the District to control costs for this project.

Recognizing that over 100 agencies in the District regularly use the financial data warehouse to meet city and federal reporting mandates, we have assisted the CFO’s office to instituted a formal business process to reconcile information in the data warehouse with data in the District’s transaction applications. Reconciliation is done using an automated, web-based process each morning after the data warehouse refresh is completed.

BI, Analytics, and Dashboards

Our Methodology – 360° View of Metrics

Methodology

Along with technology assessment, we evaluate what methodology best suits your business needs. You may require a full-scale enterprise data warehouse or a mix of data warehouse, data mining, and OLTP reporting components. Your efforts may be driven by mandates and legislative deadlines or you may be embarking on an enterprise solution, which will need to be done in phases. We help you discover the methodology or combination of methodologies that will work best for you.

IT

Once you have laid the foundation of your BI effort, we assist you to build, validate, rollout, and train your users in the new solution.

We are proud to say that our framework has provided repeated success to our clients. It is simple. It is logical. And it is driven by one overriding factor: your business need drives the solution that we will develop. Unlike other frameworks that pigeonhole you into a set way of creating BI solutions, our approach is flexible and ensures your success.

We start with asking our clients the most important questions: why are you doing this and what do you want to measure? This helps us to define a business-case which supplies the drivers and sponsors needed to create a successful solution. Typical outputs of this stage include a mission statement along with a list of executives who will be directly responsible for achieving the desired outcomes.

Strategies

Based on the needs of our clients, we determine the strategy to meet the desired outcomes. Is the need specific enough to warrant an ad hoc reporting environment? Or are the floodgates going to open once you have a BI solution, in which case a value-added environment is a critical success factor. Strategy discussions lead to a vision statement for the project.

Roadmap

Along with the sponsors, we develop consensus on how to bridge the gap between the current state of reporting and analysis to the desired outcomes. Roadmaps include of high level plans and timelines.

Technologies

Once you know what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it, we encourage and assist you to find the right tools and technologies. We develop

Six Steps to Business Intelligence Success

To create a value-added BI environment, we encourage our clients to think top-down. Ask yourself: what do we want to measure, how will we get from here to there, what technologies will we use, and then create the building blocks that are required. At Entigence, we use our Six Steps to BI Success methodology to create successful BI solutions.

Email : information@entigence.com

Phone : (202) 429 8847

Email : information@entigence.com

Phone : (+91)80 4095 6724 ]]> http://entigence.com/contact-us-right-content/feed 0 http://entigence.com/bi-performance-management-right-content?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bi-performance-management-right-content http://entigence.com/bi-performance-management-right-content#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:54:24 +0000 admin http://entigence.com/?p=99 Continue reading →]]>

Entigence has a repertoire of best practices for a variety of industries to help you adjust to this new reality in a short span of time. First, we help you discover strategies that are best suited for your organization. Then we lead you with designing and implementing a business intelligence-based performance management environment that is tightly tied to your strategic objectives. Our approach connects your performance to your strategic goals with direct and instantaneous impact.

Our market research services are closely tied to customer satisfaction studies be it as simplistic as Net Promoter Score (NPS) studies or customized customer satisfaction studies that involve multi-dimensional satisfaction measures. Our customer satisfaction studies are also complemented by high end analytics to identify drivers for customer satisfaction and can be integrated to CRM systems through our Enterprise Systems consulting services.

Our experience with large-scale enterprise products such as the PeopleSoft suite positions us to provide production support for the ERP applications as well. Entigence has recently embarked on expanding our team with resources who have over 10 years of experience with these ERP applications, specifically PeopleSoft. With the expansion of our team, our goal is to enter the systems integration domain for large-scale ERP initiatives as well as to provide production support for these initiatives.

In Fall 2010, the DC Government is planning to prepare use of our application for the sixth consecutive budget preparation. Since its inception, we have incorporated capital budgeting and position budgeting into our solution. The solution, Budget Formulation Application (BFA), is built on Microsoft’s ASP.Net platform with an Oracle band-end and Cognos for business intelligence. Please visit cfoinfo.dc.gov for a look at the dashboard that allows search and selection of executive views of operating budget data to the citizens of the District of Columbia.