Founded in the late 1950s with a mission to improve the financial well-being of America’s professional military families, the company today serves clients from all walks of life at all stages of life. As a Registered Investment Adviser firm, the company develops and delivers comprehensive financial plans to assist American families in their efforts to reduce debt, build wealth and pursue their financial goals and dreams.
BI Architectural Assessment
Empower growth plan and operational goals for success
Overview
The company is undertaking new business initiatives to expand its base of Advisors, provide customers a wider array of products, and adapt its business model to a changing financial market. These initiatives will require a greater use and emphasis on customer data for targeted marketing, customer up- and cross-selling, analysis of product and customer profitability, and customer service. These initiatives also require strong support to the company’s Financial Advisors, who require access to customer data, product offerings, and an easy-to-use system for sales and support.
Strategy and Goals
The company’s executive management has included Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and BrokerDealer Software as two of the company’s top five objectives. Each of these two initiatives is cross-functional and requires data from many of the company’s application systems. Addressing the technical approaches for supporting these initiatives have fallen to the Enterprise Architecture group in IT. Enterprise solutions are challenging because they must meet the needs of several departments, gather and integrate data from several disparate application systems, and deliver data that has the highest level of integrity, correctness, and consistency. This is especially true for Customer data, the handling and use of which is technically known as a subset of Master Data Management.
The Enterprise Architecture group engaged Myridius to provide an assessment of their architectural direction in support of Customer data and Master Data Management.
To fully support the company’s business strategy in the quickest and most cost-effective manner, the Enterprise Architecture approach must be cohesive, align business needs, technical methods, and organizational policies, practices, and procedures, and deliver into an enterprise-wide capability rather than one that is application focused.
The Final Results
Myridius provided the company with actionable recommendations and an action plan to achieve:
- Future Enterprise Architecture Framework
- Future Framework for Master Data Hub
- Future Managed Data Environment Framework
- Future BI/Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture
The Conclusion
The technical environment represented challenges to meet those goals because it became increasingly difficult to get the data required by the business managers to forecast effectively. The intent was to provide an independent best practices review of the work performed. Myridius wanted to ensure the creation of an ETL architecture and design that would meet both the tight deadlines of their immediate effort and provide a strong foundation for future phases of the data warehouse project. Simply stated, the business recognized that there were knowledge and communication gaps that needed to be bridged.
The company was working in silos and there was not an adequate system of control or standardization present. With a vast number of databases and spreadsheets that production reporting was done from, this represented a unique challenge to address.
With all these parts and vendor relationships to manage, our client realized more efficiency and integration of data from one source system of record. It also was able to ensure data quality, integrity and reliability in order to update data daily and near-real-time when possible.
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