BI Governance, Dashboard Management and Support Services

A Massachusetts state agency had a goal of making better use of data to support business decisions by creating a data-informed culture, streamlining access to data and standardizing data management and governance.  To that end, the agency was interested in establishing a standard enterprise business analytics platform and developing a set of processes and a sustainable service model to support the platform on an ongoing basis.

In support of these objectives, the agency had adopted PowerBI for its dashboard and reporting platform to support the visualization needs of its leadership and project teams.  To continue to support its executive and operational dashboard and reporting needs, the agency was seeking a partner to provide analysis, design, architecture, development, and data integration support.

Challenges

Leading up to this initiative, the agency had faced challenges making data-driven decisions and maintaining visibility to key metrics.  The business stakeholders spent significant amount of time cobbling data together from multiple systems, often finding that necessary data was unavailable, unusable, or unreliable. This left the agency in a position of making decisions and developing metrics based more on assumptions and individual experience and less on objective analysis of information.

Having selected PowerBI as its analytics and visualization platform, the agency also faced a challenge of integrating the platform with its existing systems, rolling the platform out to the agency and determining what metrics, analytics, and performance indicators to focus on.  The agency also needed to overcome an organizational challenge around data literacy and limited experience with data visualization.

Results

Working with Triverus, the agency was able to overcome these challenges and start recognizing the benefits of being a data-informed organization. To solve the scope and challenge of rolling out a new enterprise business analytics platform, Triverus worked with the agency to develop a “Monday-morning actionable” roadmap that defined and prioritized the key business metrics, analytics and key performance indicators and an approach for executing the roadmap that would deliver immediate value to the organization.  Using the roadmap, Triverus was also able to support the agency rollout and adoption of PowerBI and over the course of the initiative created over 125 dashboards and reports supporting multiple business domains. To ensure ongoing success with the new platform, Triverus worked with the agency to establish the necessary training and governance program to support and grow the data-literacy of the business stakeholders throughout the organization.

How We Helped

During this initiative, Triverus provided executive and operational dashboarding and reporting services for multiple business domains. Triverus integrated with multiple operational systems to stage the data for use in these dashboards. In support of the high demand by business and technical stakeholders for additional analytics, Triverus worked with executive stakeholders to define a prioritization process to ensure alignment between the organization’s business needs and the team’s focus of effort. This process provided streamlined prioritization and transparency to stakeholders for each request.

In addition to the core services above, out team provided general business analysis services to assist with documenting and analyzing the work queues used to manage tasks for several key business functions. Triverus evolved the agency’s governance plan for PowerBI to provide guidance for the agency’s application of PowerBI tools and services and has facilitated guidance for the acquisition of data from third-party sources.