Now, more than ever, data is at the center of the enterprise. For decades, data architecture and management practices have evolved, becoming more ingrained and valuable to business operations, sales and development.

Leveraging proven data management services, NEOS can help you overcome your data strategy and delivery challenges. Our services, listed below, are grounded in reality and developed through experience and expertise to deliver practical, high-quality results.

Data Management Services

• Data Integration & Consolidation
• Strategic Planning & Governance
• Business Research Modeling & Analytics
• Data Management Assessment, Enablement and Review
• Data Architecture Modeling, Planning and Implementation
• Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
• Master Data Management

Data Management Solutions

• EIM & Corporate Risk
• Enterprise Data Topology
• Research Data Sandbox

Data Integration and Consolidation

Silos of data are characteristic of companies that have grown through acquisition, were early adopters of web-based customer service, were re-structured organizationally or were product/market oriented in the past.

If globalization is a factor in your future business and service-oriented architecture is part of your IT strategy, data integration and consolidation is an essential ingredient in your current planning. NEOS Data Migration & Consolidation Delivery Services can help you assemble your data and be positioned to provide high-quality, consistent data while saving budget dollars by consolidating and sun-setting legacy systems.

Using aspects of our adaptive approach, NEOS seeks to help clients simplify their data architecture.

• Rationalize: We review your current data assets, including business interfaces, score them according to your needs and recommend a suitable approach.
• Orchestrate: We review, or design, your enterprise data implementation strategy, profile legacy data sources and create integration plans to move forward.
• Evolve: We create and build the architecture and maps, adapt interface and ensure continuance of business operations.

Now, more than ever, the need to simplify and consolidate data into a single physical architecture is paramount, affordable and leads to long-term cost savings.

While NEOS can conduct this service with all major enterprise technology, we excel in providing this service with the Oracle Exadata platform.

Contact us to find out how you can achieve long-term cost savings and further discuss a true, holistic approach to data integration and simplification for your enterprise.

Strategic Planning & Governance

Building a data strategy is hard work with many considerations, some of the top being: the health, growth and acceptance of corporate data, ensuring data transparency and insight into lineage and linkages and building the right team to implement your strategy. Once your data strategy is set, data governance comes into play to ensure that your strategy is planned, managed and well executed going forward. The key to good governance is to keep it relevant and practical to your business.

Our Strategic Planning & Governance services include:

• Analysis of current state data architecture, operations and business utilization.
• Review of data technology tools in place (databases, ETL, reporting, data mining, platforms, etc.)
• Business strategy to data assessments; a gap analysis of where the business is going and your current data state.
• Operational review of your organization and its capacity to meet an optimal data-state.
• Establishment of data governance that will flex and grow with your organization.

NEOS can help you achieve and exceed the expectations of your business partners by designing a data strategy that meets your business needs, matches your organization and integrates with your overall IT strategy. Our most experienced managers and architects work with IT and business executives in developing long-term plans and road maps for executing an enterprise data strategy and positioning you to win.

Contact NEOS to learn how to best align your data strategy with your business and IT direction for optimal performance.

Business Research Modeling and Analytics

The enablement of research models to support product development, predictive analysis and the assembly of data to support regulatory requirements has become a necessity in organizations around the world. Internal research organizations like actuarial groups, compliance units, marketing and product development need easier and faster access to data and analytics without the burden and delay of rigid development life-cycles.

As the reality of this business-practical begins to take hold in organizations, the management of models that manipulate data into true "business intelligence" becomes paramount. NEOS can help your organization:

• Define its research data needs.
• Coordinate the data needs of your research, actuarial or analytical models.
• Create a data organization (with our "Sandbox" solution) that supports data assembly with models.
• Create a management model to support development and maintenance of your models (model governance).
• Interpret model, data and research needs into "IT requirements" when/if you decide to make this data ecosystem production ready.

Find out more about business research modeling and analytics today.

Data Management Assessment, Enablement and Review

In the last 15+ years, the term 'data management' has grown from designing relational data models to managing corporate reference data and everything in between. With this growth, many theories have arisen on the "proper" way to manage data. Many of these theories have been implemented by organizations around the world.

The danger with "theory" is that it is often not practically implemented within an organization. Implementing theory without practicality leads to enormous wasted cost; and, worse, a divide between business operations and IT organizations. NEOS can help you:

• Assess your current data management and governance practices.
• Recommend changes that will streamline the data management and governance processes.
• Optimize the alignment of business strategy and data services.
• Recommend insight into growth potentials for your organization to better serve your companies' business needs.

Contact NEOS today to discuss methods of reviewing your data operations and how we can best position your group to succeed in today's challenging business climate.

Data Architecture Modeling, Planning and Implementation

Too often an art form instead of a science, a data model must reflect the business domain embodied within, as well as the broader business utilization that it will serve. Our practical approach to data architecture ensures that you will have an implementation that meets the current need and grows with your future needs.

Our Data Architecture services include:

• Subject Model (see our "Data Topology"), logical and physical data model design
• Data dictionary and model development
• Data structure performance optimization
• Scalability and growth assessments/planning
• Physical database creation and administration
• Data movement and population analysis, design and implementation

NEOS architects and modelers all have a minimum of 10 years experience in the design of high performing data architectures ranging from classic OLTP systems to customized solutions such as an enterprise client data hub or a reporting data mart.

Although we have a very strong history with Oracle technologies, we also have extensive experience with Microsoft, Sybase and IBM relational platforms and supporting architecture. Find out more about data architecture modeling, planning and implementation today.

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Data warehousing and business intelligence have become absolute necessities for organizations. The drive for information to make informed business decisions has never been more important than in our current environment: What new products will you bring to the market and who will you sell them to? Can we trend financials in our newest market segments? Are our customer service levels being met?

Along the way, data warehousing and business intelligence have sometimes gotten a bad rap. Old school thinking endorses "build it and they will come." In many organizations, this approach has led to an extraordinary cash spend with very little to show in the way of providing better business value. The term "Data Warehousing" has actually become taboo in some organizations, as it has been aligned with huge spend and little value.

Instead, NEOS looks at a clients need to "warehouse" data as really a requirement to provide data to a business user in an organized manner that is optimized for reporting, research or mining.

The NEOS approach blends to meet your organization and your budgets appetite; we advocate a holistic view of the data (what might the business want) in our planning and designs and then implement what is actually required by the business (in order to meet budgetary and user requirements). By taking this approach, we can ensure that the business gets what is needed and that it has the ability to add more data subjects and capability in the future, without reaching a data dead-end.

NEOS Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence services include:

• Data warehouse and reporting strategy
• Requirements gathering and analysis
• Source system assessments and profiling
• Business intelligence tool assessments and recommendations
• Data architecture implementation
• ETL architecture design, data mapping and development
• Reporting architecture design, report/interface design and development

Curious about how to harness the data within your enterprise in a cost effective and efficient manner, while delivering value in a few weeks vs. a few years? Contact NEOS today!

Master Data Management

Master Data Management (MDM) aligns corporate data for use as a "golden source" of data. As the need for data has increased over time, building and implementing an MDM strategy has become critical in many corporations.

NEOS can quickly define an appropriate MDM strategy for your specific business and build a roadmap for MDM adoption and transition that is in alignment with your corporate data strategy. An important factor for enabling this roadmap is the quality of your corporate data. Using a sophisticated profiling assessment matrix, NEOS can help you nominate your primary master data and derive a centralization plan that is appropriate to your business needs and organizational capacity.

Find out more about master data management today.

EIM & Corporate Risk

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is an enterprise-level discipline implemented for defining, describing, structuring and governing information assets across organizational and technological boundaries with the aim of improving corporate transparency, improving operational efficiency and mitigating corporate risk.

NEOS helps clients enable EIM strategies that bridge the divide of structured and unstructured data, enable transparency across business divisions and provide a sound basis for managing corporate risk related to the use of data in the business.

In the worlds of insurance and financial services, the regulatory agency mandates have required that organizations have timely access to data to ensure "transparency." That transparency cannot be achieved without an over-arching data management practice that only EIM can provide. To make the leap to true EIM, NEOS has assembled an array of solutions to jump start your program.

Our EIM & Corporate Risk Solution include:

• EIM maturity assessment
• EIM adoption plan
• Corporate risk needs and gap-to-current analysis
• Compliance data operations assessment

NEOS has helped clients evolve from "standard" data management and governance practices and organizations to adapt to the broader business needs that only a true EIM strategy can satisfy.

Contact NEOS now to discuss your current data operations and how an EIM strategy might help your business succeed in this ever changing business climate.

Enterprise Data Topology

NEOS has developed a solution, coined "Enterprise Data Topology," that provides a complete view of data in the enterprise by explaining its relationship to the business and then layering technology aspects of how that data is supported in an organization's systems.

Just as a topographical map provides depth and contour to the landscape it documents, the Data Topology provides a similar perspective for its "data landscape." Using business domains to establish a Topology hierarchy, the Topology then integrates several additional layers to create depth and real understanding of the data landscape.

The Topology provides a basis for understanding the complexities of where data resides in organizations and how it is used.

Using our Topology solution, we associate:

• Business domains and subjects in a "Topology domain hierarchy"
• System Genre's ("genre's" roughly equate to business functions)
• Data context: displays data flows
• Technology information: technology platform specifics
• Lenses are provided to give perspective on how data is referred by all constituents within an organization

These key components provide a complete picture of how data is used within a company or division. Typically, this work can be completed within 6 to 8 weeks by a small team of NEOS senior consultants.

Clients use the Topology to:

• Establish governance
• Create an enterprise architecture
• Associate areas of meta-data by user groups
• Create a long-term data strategy
• Design a data consolidation or simplification roadmap
• Educate new members of a data or IT team or division

Please review our Downloads Section for Topology white papers and case studies.

Working together, we can quickly come up with a scope, duration and effort assessment for your organization. Contact NEOS find out how your organization can harness the information in a Data Topology.

Research Data Sandbox

The NEOS Research Data Sandbox is an architecture that supports analytical research through the correlation of disparate data. It is a database environment created to allow discovery of iteratively added data sources. The Sandbox supports the collection of data from external source systems (D&B, Morning Star, price files, etc.) in their native format and loosely associates data using a unified key architecture. The intent of the Sandbox is to provide a destination for researchers to conduct discovery analysis before launching into a large, formal, IT effort.

A Sandbox Is	Sandbox Is Not
An environment and supporting processes that allows data to be loaded from different sources quickly and easily.	A formal IT “production” architecture that requires heavy detailed IT analysis throughout.
A place where data lies natively, with its good and bad traits.	A storage area for scrubbed and cleansed data.
A database that loosely links data through a unified key architecture.  This linkage provides a method for researchers to query and associate data.	An area that supports the aggregation and tight/formal association of all data from multiple data sources (that would be a more formal data warehouse or mart).
A place where researchers can manipulate data and report on their impact.	A place that locks down data to be “untouchable.”
Data history may be retained, though requests must be made for each data set brought in.	A system that stores data infinitely.  Does not include cross-subject history.

Researchers must have access to data quickly in order to conduct creative, effective, research. Whether it is claims actuarial research, quantative analysis or product research, the Sandbox fosters an environment where data can be brought together with the understanding that it is not a "production" environment. This environment supports the development of analytical models, forecasts, trend analysis and financial research.

Sandbox Governance

NEOS has also developed a candidate governance structure for Sandbox environments, so that IT and their Research partners jointly understand their respective roles in supporting such a flexible, nimble, environment. This governance structure is simply a baseline model that client's can modify as it best fits their organization.

Sandbox Keying Architecture

A "key" component of the Sandbox is the keying architecture. A keying architecture is developed to support linking between data sets so that research can be performed. NEOS has developed candidate keying architectures for Personal Lines Auto, Claims Actuarial and Credit Ratings quantitative research.