Customer Success – Santa Clara County SSA

The County of Santa Clara's Social Services Agency (SSA) services 15 incorporated cities in the most populous county of the San Francisco Bay area, which is home to California's Silicon Valley. The SSA uses SAP BusinessObjects as its reporting engine, and relies on it to meet regulatory requirements for it documents of record.

Santa Clara County SSA’s Challenge

In preparation for an impending migration, the SSA needed an inventory and deep knowledge of their SAP BI system, how their reports were being used, and how those reports would be impacted. While taking steps to streamline their content migration, the SSA also had concerns about maintaining their documents of record and audit readiness.

Santa Clara County SSA implemented APOS Insight and APOS Storage Center

• Impact AnalysisThe SSA implemented APOS Insight to achieve awareness of reports, object usage and security profiles, and to understand the downstream impact of data modelling changes on reports.
• Migration ReadinessThe SSA used APOS Insight to inventory and analyze their SAP BI system content and usage. APOS Storage Center automation enabled system right-sizing and migration streamlining.
• Content RegulationThe SSA used APOS Storage Center to implement a content storage strategy that met their stringent regulatory requirements, safeguarded their content, and maintained audit readiness.

Feedback

Thinh Hong, Information System Manager at SSA Santa Clara County:

APOS Insight's impact analysis capabilities allow us to see what effect changes to our data model will have downstream. It has allowed us to analyze SAP BusinessObjects metadata effectively. APOS Storage Center provides us with an efficient, rules-based means of cleaning up our BI environment, and the ease with which it allows us to back up and selectively restore objects has been very useful.

BI & Analytics Business Cases in the Time of COVID-19

ASUG’S Undercover CIO notes in Making the Right IT Investments in Uncertain Times that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a shift in how CIOs determine the course of IT investments, citing the ASUG Pulse Check:

47% of respondents said their organizations were not canceling any planned IT initiatives, while nearly half (45%) shared that they are postponing a few planned initiatives. The top reason respondents provided to explain these cancellations was that these initiatives were not considered “core” projects.

Uncertainty has this effect, and everyone wants to manage more efficiently and still be positioned to hit the ground running when that uncertainty is resolved, which is why streamlining is such a common theme:

...you need to look at automation, as well as doing less with physical assets and more with intelligent assets. Your business case for any project right now should be about streamlining.

In BI & Analytics, as elsewhere, streamlining means doing more with less, while ensuring your organization is ready to meet an uncertain future.

Streamlining through automation is a consistent theme throughout APOS Well Managed BI & Analytics solutions. They let you take control of your deployments, helping you to manage effectively in the present and prepare for what’s next.