RED BRICK UNVEILS STRATEGIC APPROACH TO DECISION SUPPORT SUCCESS

Red Brick Systems, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of the Red Brick DecisionScape Methodology, a strategic, modular approach to the design, implementation and iteration of successful decision support systems, including data warehousing, data marts and OLAP. The DecisionScape Methodology conveys Red Brick's strategic intelligence learned in its more than 300 data warehousing implementations around the world, and provides a rapid, measurable and repeatable process to ensure immediate benefits and long-term operability.

The DecisionScape Methodology, available through Red Brick's Professional Services Organization, is a procedural compilation of strategies and tasks designed to help Red Brick customers assess critical business demands and gain future competitive advantage. The Methodology offers a modular and customized approach to fit flexible and evolving environments, and is designed to address market, IT infrastructure and critical business measurements.

The DecisionScape Methodology is another component of Red Brick DecisionScape, a comprehensive and integrated environment of products, services, methodology and partnerships designed to provide successful decision support solutions. Combined with Red Brick's products created specifically for high-end data warehousing, the Methodology helps customers and partners quickly and efficiently deploy large and complex data warehousing projects with a minimum of resources, hardware and time.

"Today, decision support projects are not measured by their ability to deliver consistent, integrated information, but by their ability to radically improve data analysis," said Andrew Priest, vice president of Solutions and Services at Red Brick. "Our ten years of historically providing successful business solutions that have given customers an edge in their market were based on repeatable, dependable strategies and techniques. The Methodology has formalized this intelligence into a process, which can now be applied through individual components or as a whole, depending on a customer's needs. The ultimate goal of the Methodology is to help customers quickly address shorter product and customer lifecycles, organizational shifts and highly volatile markets."

Red Brick DecisionScape Methodology Components

The DecisionScape Methodology consists of five phases of a rapid development approach to address the lifecycle of a decision support system (DSS). The approach is designed to be iterative and modular which helps customers customize their projects, repeat successful implementations and apply knowledge gained through DSS back into their organizational processes.

Solution Planning Phase

All DSS projects require a strategy, a solution architecture and the identification of informational requirements. The tasks and activities within this phase deliver a comprehensive strategy for the mission and vision of the data warehouse, which would include risk and business assessments, overall business reengineering recommendations and a requirements analysis. The result is a Solutions Requirements Document that includes long-term strategy, products, work and test plans.

Solution Design Phase

A system design is created using the requirements specified in the Solution Planning Phase. Logical and physical design elements are defined, including data mapping, database design, indexing strategies, file partitioning and backup and recovery plans.

Solution Infrastructure Support Phase

This phase coordinates the evaluation, selection and installation of Red Brick and partner products for hardware, front-end and back-end tools, networking and applications for the test, development and production DSS environments.

Solution Implementation Phase

Once the DSS design and infrastructure are determined, implementation of the data warehouse or data mart occurs. Indexes; partitioning; data mining and query tool implementation; and data acquisition, transformation and loading are all implemented and tested. Performance tuning is applied at this stage. The final element of this phase is the demonstration and acceptance of the solution.

Solution Maintenance Phase

This phase addresses the evolution and iteration of the DSS project. More performance tuning occurs to address business needs, additional requirements are assessed and implemented, and a long-term evolution plan is prepared. This phase is ongoing for the life of the DSS and can result in a repeatable process for additional implementations within the organization.

The Red Brick DecisionScape Methodology is available immediately through the services of the Red Brick Professional Services Organization. For more information, see http://www.redbrick.com