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Terry  Garber  

South  Carolina  Department  of  Revenue  

FTA  Technology  Conference  2011  

The  day  before  a  Governor’s  Cabinet  meeting….  

SCDOR  –  Sometime  in  2008  

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Compiling  Data  to  Prepare  Our    Agency  Director  

The  day  before  a  Governor’s  Cabinet  meeting…  

Now  at  SCDOR    

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• Selected  SAP  Business  Objects  suite  •  Brought  in  several  BI  vendors  for  Proof  of  Concept  •  Business  Objects  allowed  SCDOR  business  users  to  be  

productive  more  quickly  and  easily  •  State  was  implementing  SAP  for  statewide  accounting  

• Brought  in  contracted  Project  Manager  • Experience  in  reporting,  data  cleansing,  and  data  mining  

• Good  “people  person”  for  working  with  business  users  

• Built  technical  team  • Data  analyst  from  Data  Warehouse  team  • Contracted  systems  administrator  and  developer  

Getting  Started  

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• Goal  to  provide  something  useful  for  every  division  

• Replicated  Reports  • Based  on  existing  reports  from  legacy  or  new  system  • Grabbed  pre-­‐print  report  files  • Re-­‐created  reports  in  Business  Objects  

• Low  Risk  • Avoided  need  for  database  navigation  • Easy  to  know  when  it  was  correct  

• High  Benefits  • Users  could  sort,  group,  and  filter  • Combined  summary  and  detail  reports  for  drill-­‐down  

Rapid  Deployment  Strategy  

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• Easy  to  create  graphs  from  existing  reports  

• Replaced  manual/Excel  efforts  

• At–a-­‐glance  performance  monitoring  for  agency  management  

• Shared  with  the  rank  and  file  by  each  agency  division  • Loaded  onto  division  Sharepoint  pages  • Default  pages  for  morning  log  on  

• Key  measures  displayed  on  agency  intranet    

Dashboards  

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• Business  users  liked  the  tools  • Ability  to  merge  data  from  multiple  systems  

• Ability  to  automate  manual  reporting,  especially  compilations  from  multiple  reports  

• Operational  reporting  stays  with  Applications  Services  • Needed  to  complete  an  operational  process  • Often  time  critical  

• Management  reporting  moves  to  Business  Objects  • Backlog  of  reports  from  new  tax  system  • New  requests,  often  from  outside  the  agency  

Results:  Highly  Successful  

• Need  for  native  data  navigation  and  extract  

• More  difficult  to  test  –  how  to  tell  when  it’s  right  

• Need  for  Business  Analyst  with  tax  system  knowledge    

• Evolution  from  Project  to  Working  Unit  • Standards  • Quality  Assurance  • Full  system  development  life  cycle  • Documentation  standards  

• Backlog  and  priority  management  

• Added  second  data  analyst  and  second  developer  

New  Challenges  

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• Technology  management  in  IT  • Server  and  storage  administration  • Product  releases  and  patches  • Security  administration  • Performance  monitoring  and  tuning  • Data  administration  

• Report  creation  shared  • High  complexity/accuracy/performance  reporting  in  IT  • What-­‐if/how-­‐many/show-­‐me  querying  by  users  •  In  many  cases,  a  well-­‐structured  universe  and  a  few  well-­‐designed  templates  can  allow  business  users  to  replace  an  inventory  of  developed  reports    

Roles:    IT  vs  Business  Users  

• Tier  One  or  “golden”  data  • From  legacy  or  new  processing  systems  • More  likely  to  be  accurate  to  start  with  

• Tier  Two  or  Data  Warehouse  data  •  Intended  for  statistical  or  trending  usage  • May  not  include  anomalies  or  exception  data  • May  include  data  from  external  sources  

• Tier  Three  or  user-­‐maintained  data  • Multiple  formats:  MS  Excel,  MS  Access,  .csv  

• Garbage  in,  garbage  out!  

It’s  All  About  the  Data  

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• Need  to  build  inventory  of  denormalized  tables  • Selection  of  data  elements  that  may  be  used  for  reporting  • How  to  flatten  data  without  losing  key  relationships  

• Creating  and  scheduling  extract  packages  

• Designing  universes  as  needed  • Logical  views  • Data  objects  that  can  be  reused  

• Combining  data  from  multiple  sources  • Making  sure  that  combined  on  a  common  dimension  

• Apples  and  oranges  

• Determining  aggregation  –  table,  universe,  or  report  

Data  Management  

• Automate  not  just  manual  reports,  but  also  manual  business  processes  

• Example:    Debtor’s  Corner  • Starts  with  extract  from  legacy  Collections  system  

• Splits  by  district  office,  converts  to  MS  Excel,  and  emails  spreadsheets  to  the  districts  –  all  automatically  

• District  managers  review  for  taxpayers  that  should  be  removed  from  the  lists,  and  email  them  to  main  office  

• Main  office  coordinator  does  final  pass  and  saves  data  

• Business  Objects  imports  and  combines  spreadsheets,  creates  final  list,  and  formats  for  web  posting  

New  Composite  Applications  

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• Business  Intelligence  doesn’t  just  happen  automatically  when  you  install  a  BI  product  suite  

• You  need  an  introductory  strategy,  strong  sponsorship,  and  technically  competent  core  team  

• As  BI  evolves,  data  management  becomes  the  key  challenge  –  it  can  make  or  break  the  effort  

• Enable  the  business  users  wherever  possible  –  but  be  prepared  for  complex  development  by  core  team  

• Encourage  creativity!    Some  of  the  best  BI  apps  start  with  a  “here’s  what  I  would  like”  sketch  

Summary  

Questions??