MSD was seeking to implement a corporate data warehouse (CDW). The implementation was expected to provide MSD with a foundation of centralized data and performance information that would unlock new financial reporting and accounting capabilities and efficiencies.
As this would be MSD’s first corporate data warehouse, and a highly visible project in the organization, there was significant pressure to ensure the project went smoothly. MSD required a trusted partner that could define a solution and then design, architect and configure the production environment for the data warehouse implementation, all while remaining within a modest project budget.
Risks were also an important consideration with the new processes, technologies and support model that would be implemented. The project would draw data from mission critical applications (which support high-profile business areas) which necessitated a significant investment in both planning and quality assurance. An example of a critical application is the Income Assistance system (that includes the largest cheque-run in the province) that would require an extremely high standard of work as the smallest error in payment can quickly become a serious public issue.
The project would need to be based on Cognos, the current government-standard toolset for Business Intelligence.
Quartech would supply a full compliment of Cognos experts capable of providing a broad array of services and guidance towards enabling the CDW project. Important components of a successful strategy would be dependent on a number of distinct service areas including:
- Data design for the initial release, including development of data models and data element definitions, maintained in System Architect
- Design of data acquisition and transformation rules for ETL using Decisionstream
- Design, validation, storage and maintenance data models and metadata in the corporate metadata dictionary
- Development and delivery of four Powerplay cubes, as well as seven Reportnet reports (both prompted and drill-through format)
- Development of a support model for the data warehouse (in conjunction with MSD)
To create the data warehouse, Quartech used the Cognos toolset to interface with the Ministry's Oracle database.
Technologies used for this project include:
- Oracle
- Cognos 7.1 Toolset (later upgraded to Cognos 8):
- Reportnet (including Query Studio and Report Studio)
- Decisionstream
- Powerplay
- Framework Manager
- Access Manager
- Content Store
- Configuration Manager
- Server Administrator
- Cognos Connection
The corporate data warehouse was implemented initially for MSD’s finance and accounting staff, and then released successfully across the entire ministry. Quartech’s expert team in Cognos, CDW, financial reporting, and business process re-engineering were critical to the success of this project.
The corporate data warehouse continues to provide MSD with:
- Improved financial reporting and general reconciliation capabilities
- Improved accounting capabilities
- A foundation for the utilization of new business intelligence products, further expanding analysis and reporting capabilities and creating new opportunities for organizational performance improvement