Challenge

The goal of BSR is to run a high qualitative local taxation of her participants more cost-effective than the individual participants themselves. This young organisation has been established in 2008. Sinds then, BSR has been constantly evolving to improve herself. Participants expect to be informed regularly about the state of affairs, such as: actual and expected tax revenues, number of cancellations, number of objections and treatment times.

BSR realised that the ad hoc query execution on her operational tax-database was not the way to meet the information needs.

Moreover, the execution of ad hoc queries was a time consuming activity which only a few people could carried out.  The latter also causing a potential continuity risk for the organisation.

Identification and prioritisation of the information needs

It was clear that the current method of data collection, analysis and reporting was no longer sufficient. It became clear there was an need for a more structural solution. The first question which arised was "What information need exists for the various users?" This was the key reason to start gathering all information requirements, initially without considering details and relevance. Then BSR was able to set priorities based on a few simple criteria:

• How often is the information desired (need)?
• What is the relevance to the core processes (application)?
• Which underlying data is required (scope)?

Besides the information needs, BSR had another important information requirement. Which was the ability for users to independently analyse the data and make reports without relying on additional (external) expert knowledge for supplying the data.

Agile design of a Business Intelligence environment

As so often happens, also here at BSR, the complete list of information requirements was far greater than the available budget. Our approach, where budget & time are fixed and the delivered functionality is variable helped to convince BSR that a large amount of the high priority functionality could be delivered in the available budget.

In the Agile project approach, the project was divided into 3 sprints.

1. Sprint was aimed at unlocking the necessary data. According to the best practice is the entire source unlocked without any change in structure or content.
2. During the 2nd sprint is the most complex part of the requested functionality implemented, namely the calculation of charges and receipts for each taxable item.
3. In the third sprint, the remaining functionality is delivered.

Throughout the project, there were weekly and sometimes daily end users sessions where the realised functionality, however small it may be, was discussed. This ensures maximum end-user involvement and optimal adjustment of the project.

Making self-service reports

The main concern for BSR end users was to make self-service analysis and reports. This was made possible by using standard OLAP technology and a friendly web-based end-user application. During the project, users got a one day training in order to use this application.

Already during the project, these users set to work with the available data, in order to develop understanding of the data and also to carry out the final solution validation. The BSR organisation now has made several​​ self-service reports designed and developed by their own members. Now the analysis cube answers many standard questions. Participants and customers of BSR can use the solution at their convenience any time of day accessible via a web portal.

Results

At this time, both the BSR participants and the internal organisation have got independently access to relevant information. By doing so, insight in financial and operational performance has been significantly improved, as a result, the workload of administrators decreased and the transparency of BSR's services to its participants improved dramtically. Because the information is now available in one place for everyone and the reliability of the information has increased, the organisation can optimize its service to her participants further.

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