Design Document

INTRODUCTION

What problem do you hope to solve? Why is it important?

Our reporting development teams are overwhelmed with report requests from our report consumers. Our staffing is such that we are not able to keep up with demand. As a result, there are many unfulfilled report requests and time to complete new reports can often hinder operations.

To help alleviate this problem my hope is to introduce and train our report consumers on using a one stop shop, self-reporting tool to Analyze diverse and broad data sets, Investigate outliers, and Develop their own reports and dashboards on demand without having to go through our report development process.

Who do you think your customers are? Who has the problem you’re hoping to solve?

Our customers for this endeavor will include data savvy report consumers who are also early adopters of technology. These customers include business analysts as well as leaders of our organization who routinely find themselves struggling to pull in data from many sources to generate the reports they need to run operations.

Business Introduction

We are the report developers at Wellstar. We’re going to engage our report consumers to build self-reporting mechanisms for our early adopters and thought leaders.

BUSINESS BLUEPRINT

Customers: Who are you serving?

Early adopters of reporting technology; report consumers who are data savvy; report consumers who require a more flexible method to analyze data on demand

Offer: What product or service will you make and deliver?

We will build custom data cubes per customer area. Early prototypes will involve focused cubes around Hospital Billing and Emergency Department visits. These products will come with weekly training sessions and enhancements incorporated per the customers needs.

Revenue Model and Price: How will you make money? How and what will you charge your customers?

Initially revenue will be earned in the form of hours saved. This will be calculated by timed saved in the collection and analysis of data by our customers as well as time not consumed by our report developers to build out new report solutions or dashboards. As more cubes are built and distributed through the company, there may be potential to bill our customers for their server time in an effort to reinvest in our infrastructure to improve system performance.

Channels: How will you get your offer to customers?

Because our customer base is limited to just our company, finding customers to use this product will mainly be attained through word of mouth. As these products are used by early adopters, we expect that other users within their service area will also desire use of the self-service reporting tool as our early adopters become more proficient and dependent on the tool. We also expect the success of these early cubes to drive business needs for more custom self-reporting tools for continued development and consumption by the organization.

Value Proposition: What customer need(s) are you fulfilling? What’s the unique promise your offer provides?

Our product will provide large amounts of data that our end users can report on. This data can be pivoted and analyzed from any data perspective within the cube. Currently customers must pull data from many sources to do their analysis. This tool promises to give all of that data in a one stop shop and even allows us to marry data from different vendors, data sets, and other analytic products.

Costs: How much does it cost to create and deliver your product?

Initial cost to develop a custom cube generally takes about 120 hours to build. This is followed up with weekly 1 hour sessions to train end users and find gaps within the build that need further development. Depending on the complexity of new development requests, additional build time will be hard to estimate. Overall, I expect that 1 FTE can cover 3-4 self-reporting tools, including support, new development, and training efforts over the life of the tool. Delivery of the product occurs within an already existing technical infrastructure. Initial technical costs to deploy will be minimal however increased usage on our infrastructure resources will require us to continually monitor and possibly upgrade our system resources to keep up with demand.

Partners: What key relationships and systems will help you create and deliver your offer?

The most key relationship will be that between the report consumer and the self-reporting tool builder. This interaction will be key to ensuring the success of the deployment and it’s eventual expansion to new users. From a systems perspective, as more self-reporting tools are added, we will need to work with our IT Infrastructure team to ensure our servers have the resources necessary to support our endeavors.

Team and Resources: What skills/capabilities/resources will you need?

Self-Reporting Developer: Requires familiarity with the data model to be used for self reporting, understanding of how to build the self-reporting tool (cubes), and an ability to work with report consumers to continually train and improve the tool.

Report Consumers: Will need to be skilled in their area of analysis, understand the data that is being presented, and have a desire to learn the new tool.

Infrastructure: We will require our IT infrastructure team to help monitor our systems so that we can keep them running at peak performance as our server usage increases over time.

CREATING VALUE

What do you understand about your customer’s needs that your competitors don’t? (Insightful)

Our internal competitors are other reporting teams that utilize our data sets. These teams build dashboards and reports for consumers that are often static or focused on a particular issue. They do not understand that not all report consumers want or require curated data. Often the best analysts within our company would be more successful with the self-reporting tools we are designing to drive value within the organization.

Our external competitors are vendors who offer add-on reporting services. These competitors often bring shiny tools that appear impressive but often require extensive work from our report developers to enable. These solutions are often expensive to acquire, expensive to build, and have maintenance costs associated with them. These vendors tend to develop turn-key solutions that are meant to be sold to multiple clients and can often lack the ability to report on the nuances of individual businesses. In contrast, our solution can all be done internally for minimal costs and maintenance. These solutions are tailored specifically to our consumers and therefore have the potential to add much more value to our analysts.

What do you do (or have) that no one else does, and can’t easily acquire? (Unique)

My skill set is uniquely honed for creating self reporting tools on our organizations data sets. I have more experience with our various data models than most users and I am also the only person in the company familiar with how to build cubes. This knowledge was attained over several years and is not easily taught to others.

Who will be super-passionate about your business? (Targeted)

Experienced analysts who find the stagnant, curated report delivery of our current system limiting to their ability to analyze data the way they want to.

What are the value propositions? (Our customers will choose our product because…)

They will be able to pull data from many sources from one tool.
They will be able to generate new reports and dashboards on demand without report developer interaction.
They will be able to deep dive their data sets and do analysis using their experience rather than depending on others to align to their way of thinking.

Advertisement Value:

Capture Value: Identify businesses that produce an offer similar to yours.

Capture Value: List and prioritize your business’s most important costs. To create offer (D – Differentiate; F – Flexible; S – Outside of control):

D – My time to build, customize and train users on the product

F – Identifying users who can make use of this tool

F – Identifying and bringing in data from disparate sources

F – Bringing others up to speed on building self-reporting solutions as usage expands

S – Server power to support operations

Capture Value: List and prioritize your business’s most important costs. Get your offer to customers (D – Differentiate; F – Flexible; S – Outside of control):

D – Identification of customers who are interested and capable of self-reporting

F – Training schedules to educate and further customize self-reporting solutions

S – Keep users interested in moving forward; do not lose momentum due to complexity

TO FULFILL OUR VALUE PROPOSITION, OUR MOST IMPORTANT COSTS INCLUDE THE PEOPLE WHO BUILD THE SOLUTIONS, THE TIME OF OUR CUSTOMERS TO SPEND BECOMING EFFECTIVE WITH THE TOOL, AND THE CYCLICAL NATURE OF BUILDING, TRAINING, AND IMPROVING THE PRODUCT.

Capturing Value: Rate Sheet

We are Enterprise Data Services located in IT Shared Services. We are going to build custom self-reporting tools for your business area for you to do on-demand reporting, build custom reports dashboards that you can share with others, and to query multiple data sources in a one-stop shop tool. Our customers will choose our products because no one else can build them for them.

Plan One (typical)

The Godfather:

You get a custom developed self-reporting tool with on-going customization and training to aid you in your business endeavors and this will cost you a favor, to be called upon later, for every significant find or savings brought by this tool in your day-to-day operations.

Plan Two (stretch)

The Aladdin Method:

You get a custom developed self-reporting tool with on-going customization and training to aid you in your business endeavors and this will cost you a reciprocal action of attempting to resolve custom report requests your team may have prior to submitting a report to our report development intake request process.

Plan Three (wild idea)

The Jerry Macquire Method:

You get a custom developed self-reporting tool with on-going customizations and training to aid you in your business endeavors and this will cost your area a one-time monetary bonus equivalent to 20% of the estimated time saved from using the self-reporting tool after 3 years of usage.

DELIVERING VALUE

HOW MIGHT YOU MEET MORE CUSTOMER NEEDS?

Weekly meetings to help teach the concepts behind self reporting;
Continuous improvements based on consumer feedback; and
Open availability to power users to help drive success.

HOW MIGHT YOU BUNDLE AND PARTNER?

Incorporate some new report intake requests with a cube report build and one time training on the specific report produced;
Identify early adopters and data savvy people from other areas and build custom solutions for them based on their partnering in the process; and
Encourage early adopters to build libraries that can be used by other individuals.

HOW MIGHT YOU MOVE DIRECT TO CONSUMERS?

Begin to fulfill new report requests with pre built reports based in the self reporting tool;
Embed key cubes users within important meetings to pull out data requested on demand; and
Build a Sharepoint site with successes that can be distributed within newsletters looking for new users.

HOW MIGHT YOU CONSIDER THE FUTURE?

Incorporating new tools such as Power BI will enable us to send dashboards through any media (phone, web, e-mail, etc);
New Report requests would first go through self reporting power users, should the report not be possible, and the data not easily moved into the tools, the request would continue onto the report developers; and
Leadership supporting self-reporting solutions over custom development.