Setting up, managing and using a complex Business Intelligence platform

CSI-Piemonte (Consortium for Information Systems in Piedmont) builds and manages Information Systems for public authorities in Italy in the Piedmont region. The consortium has adopted a Business Intelligence (BI) platform made up of SAS® and SAP BusinessObject® solutions. The company has been working with SAS® for 30 years and nowadays it has a BI Competency Centre (BICC), set up in order to use and manage the platform as its optimal level; the BICC's roots date back to the 80s. In this platform both hardware and software of all customers converge on a single high reliable infrastructure based on SAS® 9.2 and SAP BusinessObject® XI and the SAS® component is designed as a Grid Platform. On this architecture CSI-Piemonte design a wide range of BI applications to support the Piedmont local institutions. Applications cover all BI use cases, taking into account also Data Quality and Data Mining issues. The platform includes Data Integration, Data Quality, Data Mining, other Analytics, Query and Reporting and Master Data Management tools. The paper focuses on the overall experience of setting up and managing a BI platform of such complexity and on a success case study on e-government.