Structured Methodology - Audit

Not all organisations are newcomers to information management; an increasing number of the early adopters are looking at the next generation of Business Intelligence solutions and tools as their existing infrastructure runs out of steam or the costs of maintaining the current solution is prohibitive when measured against the returns gained.

There are also many organisations who have evolved 'Business Intelligence Solutions' which in the most extreme circumstances do not meet the basic technical and architectural requirements for a data warehouse and as a result are not best serving their user community with accurate regularly updated data from which information can be derived in a efficient and timely manor and therefore preventing business changing decisions to be made. In many of these situations the manual input required to operate these systems can be immense, making them not only unfit for purpose, but also costly in terms of operation and maintenance.

In order to asses where you are against where you want to be and therefore define the roadmap, an Audit of your existing system may need to be undertaken. In essence an Audit is a structured consultancy exercise that will look at and ases qualitively and quantitively at key elements of your system, the outcome of which will be the production a document that defines the good the bad and the ugly of your existing system highlight the areas of concern with recommendations as to possible ways forward, and the pros and cons of each, enabling you, the client to make an informed decision on what the way forward should be.

In these situations where Business Intelligence solutions already exists, for the development project to succeed audit is required in place of the Scope. Where this audit occurs it will include all the information provided by the Scoping & Feasibility Study with the additional deliverables listed below.

• Full audit of the existing system (including a functional and quality review).
• A gap analysis detailing the current systems shortfalls.
• A recommendation regarding the upgrade path