ShowCase Services Monitor BI Implementation Cycle

• 07/18/2000

Two new service offerings from ShowCase Corporation (Rochester, Minn.) are designed to help businesses evaluate and ensure the effectiveness of their business intelligence infrastructure.

ShowCase announced this week it will offer Implementation Planning and Effectiveness Audit services, which will assist companies both in the early stages of BI planning and after a solution is implemented. Implementation Planning is a service that provides clients with a detailed consultant report on probable end-user requirements. This process is designed to provide a kind of “roadmap” for initiating a data warehouse project. After a solution is implemented, companies can deploy ShowCase’s Effectiveness Audit Service to monitor user response time, systems resource utilization and changing user requirements.

Paul Hesser, vice president of global client services at ShowCase, said customer demand prompted the development of these two complementary service offerings.

“Implementation Planning helps organizations truly understand the commitment they’re about to make up-front and what the process requires from start to finish,” Hesser said. “Not only does this exercise deepen their investment in the project, it allows them to see the benefits from both a short- and long-term view. ...Often, we’ll find that businesses are trying to do too much with a single implementation, working with much more detail than end users really need or will ever use. This makes response times slow, which can result in fewer employees accessing the system and wasted resources. An Effectiveness Audit can pinpoint these lapses and allow an organization to address them.”

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