OCTOPAI

The Business Challenge

Use Case:

Migrating from Legacy to Modern Reporting Tools

Modern business intelligence (BI) reporting tools provide significant advantages over older tools, with greater flexibility and ease of use that enable self-service BI. Business users can leverage BI to build attractive, compelling, and interactive reports and dashboards. Enterprises are increasingly graduating to these modern reporting systems from legacy systems, but the migration process is not easy. It requires a significant amount of tedious, manual preparation to lay the groundwork for an efficient, clean migration.

• Which reports are to be migrated from the old tool to the new tool? Not every report in the portfolio is useful or relevant anymore. Focusing on the ones that are in actual use can significantly reduce the migration effort.

• How do we build a new ERD (entity relationship diagram) without duplications or old patches? Eliminating the irrelevant reports means certain data sources may no longer need representation in the reporting tool. This helps the BI team start fresh with a clean ERD.

• How can we reduce report duplication? Chances are that the legacy system has many reports that are identical or differ only in minor or cosmetic ways. Consolidating them can make the results more useful to more end users.

• Are there are any scheduling commands that should be rescheduled? When you have ETL or middleware processes that run on a schedule, generating accurate, meaningful reports depends on the upstream processes running in the correct sequence. The timing of each step needs to be analyzed accordingly.

The BI Challenge

The BI team must answer the following questions and more to ensure a pain-free, cost-effective migration:

How BI Worked Before Octopai

BI groups are accustomed to taking a manual approach when answering these questions. This means going through the portfolio, report by report, in order to:

It can require a bit of detective work, combing through logs and job schedules in disparate systems and examining stored procedure code, report definitions, and other esoterica. The process can take weeks or months. And because the company’s data landscape is naturally always changing, the BI team ends up chasing a moving target.

• Eliminate reports that simply aren’t needed anymore

• Identify redundancies, obsolete or unreliable data sources

• Target ETL processes that fail to capture relevant data or combine it effectively with other data

Octopai’s tools can take the pain, tedium, and error out of the preparation process for BI migration.

• The visual data lineage tools can show which reports are duplicates or near-duplicates; which reports rely on data sources that are obsolete, questionable, or non-existent; and more.

• ETL processes can be identified and analyzed to ensure they are generating the expected output at the right time.

• The BI team can easily see the relationships between different data sources, greatly simplifying ERD analysis.

How Octopai Empowers BI Groups

Value to the Organization

• Reduced time, effort, and error in preparing for BI system migration

• Assurance that only the reports needed are migrated and that the underlying data and calculations are sound and accurate

• Faster execution of the migration project, enabling business users to take advantage of modern reporting tools sooner

Octopai is a SaaS product that empowers BI with automated metadata management for analysis & operations, data governance, data catalogs and data quality

OCTOPAIwww.octopai.com