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December 14, 2015
Information Insight

Kenway’s Journey with Information Insight

What Is Information Insight?

Kenway’s Information Insight Capability is built around the objective of allowing an organization to utilize its wealth of data as an asset. By leveraging three key components: Data Governance, Data Management, and Business Intelligence; we look to enable our clients to make strategic, data driven decisions. To provide a better idea on just how these services add value for our clients, here are some success stories from our past projects!

Data Governance is the organizing framework for establishing strategy, objectives, and policy for effectively managing corporate data. Data Governance consists of the processes, policies, and organization required to manage and ensure the availability, usability, integrity, consistency, auditability, and security of a company’s data.

A professional organization was working to implement a data governance program to more effectively manage their corporate data. The client lacked an enterprise data strategy and supporting program. As a result, significant data integrity issues and operational silos existed which adversely impacted member experience, organizational agility, and employee productivity. In order to gain executive sponsorship to support and invest in the implementation of a data governance program at the client, Kenway was tasked with providing a data governance assessment. Kenway Consulting conducted a two day Data Governance Workshop to understand the people, processes, and technology that produce or consume data at the client. The workshop primarily focused on what was working well, pain points, ingredients for success, and barriers to success. Following the workshop, Kenway provided the client with a scorecard for their overall data governance findings, a business case for the program sponsors to present to senior management, the requirements for implementing a successful data governance program, and a roadmap to delivering those requirements. This enabled the client to undertake the program with the support of the whole organization.

Data Management is comprised of the processes and technology to achieve linked data, consistent data definitions throughout your organization, an environment that offers controlled access to your data, and the people, processes, and technologies around receiving, controlling, and provisioning your data. Whereas Data Governance is the high level oversight, Data Management addresses the day-to-day execution of Data Governance policies. These two solutions go hand-in-hand as Data Management cannot be fully accomplished without Data Governance.

A large Financial Institution was unable to consistently create a holistic client view due to data quality issues in its legacy source systems. This limitation impacted many crucial business activities, including identification of cross-sell / upsell opportunities and analysis of client profitability. Kenway Consulting utilized its Data Governance Methodology and in-house tools to implement policies governing key data attributes across source systems, to analyze current state business processes and tools to understand where data issues were being introduced, and to redesign processes and tools to ensure future data entry would be complete and accurate. Kenway Consulting managed the associated data clean-up campaigns to address existing data issues that were inhibiting the creation of a holistic client record. By combining data governance policies, process and systems changes, and data clean-up activities, data quality was significantly improved and a holistic client view was consistently delivered. As a result, this client’s senior leadership embraced the need for a formalized data governance organization and committed the necessary resources. Additionally, the improved client data has become the foundation for many business intelligence initiatives.

Business Intelligence enables your organization to deliver relevant, timely and usable information to executives, managers and analysts who need it most. Business Intelligence (BI) done right is a cyclical process that begins with identifying a business problem and concludes with identifying the outcomes and insights to leverage on the next initiative.

After managing a physical therapy client’s implementation of a new Practice Management and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solution, Kenway stepped in to provide improved visibility across the client’s business units using data from the new solution. The client needed to get better insights into their 200+ locations (gained mainly via acquisition) and multiple business units. First, we established an analysis framework that put the entirety of data from the Practice Management & EMR system at management’s fingertips. Through a single BI application, we were able to reproduce the output of 20+ SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and Crystal reports. By using the data available and applying various business rules, we enabled the client to: evaluate payer performance (which identified millions of dollars of recoverable underpayments), analyze referral sources to identify key relationship building opportunities, track and improve clinical outcomes, and to analyze where clinics could improve their operational efficiency. In addition to the operational value, the BI solution has since been shaped to analyze the Return on Investment (ROI) of opening new locations and to assess the location quality of existing clinics, evaluating the performance of regional managers, and enhancing the overall decision making process.

Information Insight is the intersection of the aforementioned solutions. While each will bring value to your organization individually, failing to invest in any of them will limit your potential value. Having governed and managed data without Business Intelligence will leave you with inaccessible and disconnected data. Business Intelligence with only Data Governance leaves you with inaccurate insight, and pairing BI with only Data Management would leave you with incomplete insights. Balancing each solution is key to achieving your organization’s full potential when it comes to your data.

Want to learn more about Information Insight? Kenway’s own Jeanne-Marie Daly will be presenting at the Technology Executives Club’s Harnessing Predictive Analytics, BI, Big Data & the Internet of Things seminar on November 12th at the Union League Club. As a sponsor, Kenway has VIP passes for guests and would be happy to provide them to you and members of your team! For more information, you can:

Hope to see you there!

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