Why should you select Amadeus to guide your BICC?
Amadeus as your external provider can help to guide all contributors to the BICC group including:
- Information providers
- Information consumers
- Information analysts
- Information technologists
Guidance for information providers
The age-old adage “garbage in, garbage out” continues to exercise the minds of information providers, so whenever new data requirements are presented to a BICC, questions of provenance and data integrity will come to the fore. The BICC group will benefit from being able to listen to the experience of an external contributor, who can call upon lessons learned perhaps from within the industry sector, or from other organisations that have faced similar challenges.
Where advice is sought, Amadeus can therefore advise upon:
- Access to source data – which technologies, bulk loads and incremental loads are required?
- Data quality – when is SAS programming sufficient and when might specialist SAS solutions be needed?
- Data warehousing – how should design be approached?
- Database normalisation – is it necessary and if so what form should be deployed?
Amadeus work in all of these areas and many more concerning the provision of data to the business.
Guidance for information consumers
Clear presentation is a necessary prerequisite to informed decision-making. If information is presented badly or confusingly, a key business metric could be easily missed, misinterpreted or mismanaged. This is especially so when it is necessary to summarise information – good management depends on being able to see the wider picture combined with an ability to find the devil lurking in the detail. The BICC will need to be clear about how information is to be presented.
Presentation relies upon the availability of several elements: for example, is the data available in real-time or a “snapshot” of past events, or perhaps the results are to be presented on a browser over a narrow bandwidth connection or a handheld device with limited viewscreen. When the requirements and, just as importantly, the constraints are known, an external adviser can guide the BICC in the approach to:
- Dashboards
- Automated reporting
- SAS integration with existing tools
- Drill-down capabilities
The objective is to ensure that information reaches the right people at the right time, but in a manner that avoids misunderstanding and confusion. Amadeus have created many such reporting environments over the last twenty years and are well-placed to provide the necessary advice.
Guidance for information analysts
Researchers require data to be well-organised. They also need specialist tools to be most effective. The BICC will consider how this might be achieved, usually via a combination of processing power and data selection. SAS provides a variety of means to facilitate analysis, but which are the best to use? This is where some independent advice is welcome.
The BICC might therefore want to know more about:
- Marts – selective extracts of data reduce processing time during research
- Cubes – On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) requires power to deliver powerful analytical capabilities
- Predictive analysis – data modelling with a high degree of confidence
- Optimisation – deriving the best future outcome from a vast array of historical information
Amadeus's strong background in Business Intelligence makes us an excellent partner to advise the BICC in these areas.
Guidance for information technologists
Inevitably organisations wish for more than the technology currently available to them can deliver. As more information enters the organisation's domain, requirements grow for storage, processing power and availability. Yet it is possible, with the right knowledge, to make sure that the organisation is making the best use of hardware, bandwidth, data storage and software licences to deliver SAS capability to all parts of the organisation, not just at any one moment in time but as part of a continual process of review and improvement. An external adviser can bring experience from other SAS implementations to promote best practice and avoid potential hazards.
The BICC should consider how resources can be conserved whilst optimising the SAS environment for all that use it, including:
- Load balancing – providing processing power where it is needed, when it is needed
- Resilience and failover – making system availability as high as can be
- Storage capacity – catering for the present day and projected for future requirements
- Environment – selecting the right operating systems, middleware and verifying cross-compatibility
Whether Windows or Unix, single server or clustered, RAID or SAN, Amadeus have installed and configured systems to use all these technologies and more. We have also studied existing infrastructures, helping organisations to make their SAS environment more efficient and more flexible by extending its capability.
If you are setting up a new BICC or already run one, it is recommended that an external partner takes a full part in providing advice to the group. Selecting Amadeus as your external partner gives you access to 20 years experience of SAS.
To invite Amadeus to take part in your BICC group, please call our Business Development Director on 01993 848010.
