The Claraview Way^SM is a comprehensive, componentized methodology, designed to meet the needs of completing each step successfully while remaining focused on the overall goal and building a group of user advocates who will promote it to their peers. It positions government and commercial enterprises to undertake complicated, enterprise-wide information integration projects by carefully balancing risks and providing maximum business benefit and complete BI/DW efforts on time and on budget.

Derived from the best practices captured from hundreds of BI/DW customer projects delivered by Claraview professionals, it is comprised of a series of stand-alone activities organized into four phrases:

• Imagine - creates the enterprise information strategy and a detailed roadmap to achieve desired results;
• Architect - defines detailed business, data, and systems requirements and produces the implementation "blueprint" including detailed architecture and system design specifications;
• Implement - converts product designs into fully tested software products with agreed upon functionality and facilitates user training for the initial deployment;
• Utilize - deploys fully functional and user-accepted systems into the customer's production environment, monitors and supports the system and users in daily operations, facilitates information exchange between multiple functions at the appropriate level and the right time.

These are organized under an overall program management rubric that reaches into each of the steps and ensures consistency throughout the project and between individual BI projects, so that they fit into an overall IT architecture and deliver consistent, accurate analysis of the available data.

The Claraview Way’s componentized structure allows Claraview’s staff to leverage it at any point in a customer engagement. In each phase, Claraview’s professionals identify essential activities that deliver immediate business benefits on their own while in aggregate building toward the overall goal. The components are linked by the results they produce – the outcome of one often becoming the input to the next. They are also designed to transition smoothly between phases so that the result of one phase provides the initial input for the next. The result is a process in which success builds on success, creating management support by rewarding users through the intermediate steps, until the final goal is reached and the program not only works but has won an enthusiastic group of proponents among users who will ensure its general adoption throughout the organization.

While Claraview’s program management activities are focused on the data warehouse and BI projects in which it is involved, users should recognize that organizations need a strong overall program management office that oversees all IT development, whether that is done through the IT department or in individual LOBs or departments with their own IT specialists. Clients who do not already have this can use the Claraview approach as a foundation on which to build this function, since the principles of program management are the same regardless of the population of individual projects are ongoing at a given time.