The Cornerstone Solution ® is a strategic framework and methodology that has been systematised to deploy a comprehensive set of business intelligence services. The Cornerstone Solution® should be procured if you are planning a ‘greenfield’ business intelligence initiative. It will follows an end to end process with a full set of subsystems providing know how, best practice, quick start templates, quick start project plans, workshops and BI Centre of Excellence set up. It is BI vendor and data agnostic, in other words it can be used with any BI tool set and all types of data.
What Business Benefits will I realise through implementing Cornerstone Solution®?
You will minimise the risk of failure and cost and realise business benefits such as:
- Get valuable data insight from data analytics
- Gain a ‘joined up’ view of your company data
- Leverage business process areas together
- Turn your raw data into usable information
- Share information across your business
- Realise clean quality assured data
- Get ad hoc reporting, dashboarding and much more
The Cornerstone Solution® subsystems consist of a comprehensive toolbox covering requirements workshops, end to end BI/DW solution architecture, detailed project planning, quickstart templates, blueprints, process & governance systems, matrices, modeling, ETL, data analytics, testing and business intelligence competency centre set up. These are all deployed onsite and then customised to meet your needs. They are designed to accelerate delivery, minimise risk, and reduce cost. BISB use the systems to drive their services and deliver a working data warehouse and BI system.
Why ‘Cornerstone’?
A cornerstone is the stone that forms the base of a corner of a building that joins two walls. It is the first stone to be laid down and on which everything else is built. The cornerstone in the business intelligence system is the business intelligence framework. The BI framework must be established early but is so often missed resulting in unanticipated difficulty. In a Cornerstone Solution® everything is built out through this framework. A solution is the ‘act’ or ‘process’ of answering a problem. Cornerstone Solutions® are business intelligence services tightly integrated into systematic processes to help the organisation minimise business problems through best use of its ‘cornerstone’ business intelligence framework.
What is a Cornerstone Solution®?
A Cornerstone Solution® is a strategic business intelligence solution architecture and delivery framework innovated by BI System Builders (BISB). It consists of the Cornerstone (framework and solution architecture) and a delivery model (set of business intelligence services and mechanisms). BI solution architecture and a full set of business intelligence services and mechanisms form a full business intelligence solution known as an end to end BI solution. Cornerstone Solutions® are end to end BI solutions that include end to end solution architecture.
They consist of four broad areas. These are establishing Cornerstone Solution® framework for the systems, delivery mechanisms, working data analytics, and the business intelligence centre of excellence. These components each comprise numerous formalised subsystems designed from practical experience, know how and best practice.
Cornerstone Solution® Framework
This is the subsytems and processes that yield BI Architecture and all the subsequent structures that will underpin your data analytics and self-service BI such as your capabilities, data model, analytic engines, and metadata management. The systems include the deployment of a full set of BI services covering areas such as BI strategy, project planning, business analysis, requirements gathering workshops, dimensional modelling, ETL and testing. These occur in a structured and disciplined way through the Cornerstone Solution® framework processes.
Delivery
Delivery includes project planning, source data acquisition, data contracts, source system analysis, data profiling, ETL, physical environments, testing and delivery into production. The delivery subsystems work with all types of data including high volume and volatile big data in semi-structured and unstructured formats, legacy, mainframes, ERP, ODS, 3NF Entity, 3rd Party, xml, spreadsheets, and Access Databases etc.
Data Analytics & Self-Service BI
The delivery outcome is clean data in production, with working data analytics and self-service BI capabilities. You can read more about data analytics here.
Business Intelligence Centre of Excellence
Most organisations will want to protect and scale their business intelligence investment by establishing a BI centre of excellence (CoE) also referred to as a Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC). The Cornerstone Solution® includes a full set of subsystems for planning and setting up the BI CoE. The BICC is the optimum way to role our and maintain your business intelligence initiative.
For more information on the The Cornerstone Solution® or any of its subsystems you can reach BISB via the contact page here.