The HARKEN DATA Way

Planning and implementing effective BI capabilities is often a complex and challenging. HARKEN DATA has helped hundreds of customers undertake complicated, enterprise-wide BI projects on time and on budget, mitigating risk and providing maximum business benefit. The difference is the consistent use of our proven methodology for solution delivery and BI program management based on best-practices that is specific for BI projects: “The HARKEN DATA Way.”

This comprehensive, componentized methodology is designed to ensure the successful completion of each step, while staying focused on the overall goal. By adhering to this proven methodology, our BI consultants are able to help commercial enterprises undertake complicated, enterprise-wide information integration projects and complete their BI and data warehousing (DW) efforts on time and on budget.

Built on the best practices and experience distilled from hundreds of BI/DW customer projects delivered by HARKEN DATA professionals, our BI methodology is comprised of a series of stand-alone activities organized into five phases:

• Imagine – creates the enterprise information strategy and a detailed roadmap to achieve desired results tied to business improvement opportunities;
• Architect – defines detailed business, data and systems requirements and produces the implementation “blueprint” with detailed architecture and system design specifications;
• Implement – converts designs into completely fully tested software products with agreed-upon functionality and also facilitates user training for the initial deployment; and
• Utilize – deploys fully functional and user-accepted systems into the production environment, monitors and supports the system and users in daily operations and knowledge transfer and;
• Maintain and Measure – provides ongoing operations, system administration, tuning and help desk support that feeds back into the life cycle with “on the ground” information.

The component-based methodology enables HARKEN DATA staff to leverage it at any point within an engagement. Within each phase, we identify essential activities to deliver work products in a way that each single activity will produce business benefits on its own. The activities are linked by the results they produce, with the result or outcome of one activity often acting as an input to another. The activity relations also facilitate smooth transition between the phases such that closing one phase provides an input to initiating the next phase.