CIOs' Q&A
Q: I’m the CIO, what’s in for me? A: Viney@rd is designed to have the lowest footprint possible on corporate systems. It is designed around the most common platform available. It puts the user in charge of system maintenance. If it has to be interfaced anyway, it has a simple database to be fed. Q: How does Viney@rd fit within my systems architecture? A: Viney@rd is basically a client server system. The client is Excel 2007; the server is MS SQL Server (2005 or 2008, free editions are supported). About Excel simply ensure that your users are able to run VBA macros on their boxes.About SQL Server, if you do not have it already, a free version is available. It has a 2 Gbyte of data limit but, under that limit, a lot can be done. The free versions also fit beautifully on users’ machines. If there’s going to be a single business user within the organization, the system may reside on a single computer without affecting your global architecture. With Viney@rd, users are in charge of data, but you will have likely to feed them somehow. Usually all transactional systems allow extracting simple tabular transaction data. Those data, moved to Excel, formatted a bit and pasted on the right worksheet are saved into Viney@rd.
You may be asked, as well, to feed directly the system. This option turns Vineyard in a classic BI system and will confront you with the usual challenges of a BI project. The most common, frustrating and time consuming challenge is feeding business relevant data, as your transactional data often include transactions not relevant to the business users. Vineyard, giving the users the ability to clean up data by themselves, relieves this task. From a technical perspective, the database schema is easy enough to be understood in a glance. Q: How a Viney@rd project looks like? A: It is very different from a classic BI project, where you have to get consultants in, set up an infrastructure etc.
Just download the application and set it up. Explain to the users the few key concepts (you may refer to the manual or to this site for more details) and let them go their way.
Sometimes they’ll refer to you for some special data, but they’ll build their own system. The only concern should be about keeping SQL Server in good health and backed up, but you would do it anyway.
Do not think that users will argue about lack of an automatic loading, it will be more than compensated by their full control over data. They will no longer complain about not matching data, they’ll match them by themselves! Q: How Vineyard may help my job? A: Vineyard offers a viable alternative to classic BI systems with a fraction of the license price. It relocates part of the burden traditionally carried by IT to the users. Usually it does not require an IT project in the conventional sense, thus requiring a minor effort.
Vineyard can ease the IT job required to support a consistent control system for the company Q: How do I justify the purchase? A: It is hard to calculate a precise ROI for a BI project. It may vary from case to case depending on the specific implementation. The ROI connected to spotting business phenomena not identified before is the principal reward from adopting Viney@rd; though is clear that these are strictly connected with the business being analyzed. Anyway, a lot of tasks are moved where they can be done at best.
At a more general level, all the activities related to data quality can drop dramatically. Tedious tasks performed by Excel by the Management Accounting and Sales Analysis depts may be largely automated, thus saving time.