Defining a BI Branding Strategy

Anybody with experience in constructing a data warehouse or having been a part of a large scale business intelligence project knows it can take a great deal of capital investment, time, and resources. Tables get modeled and created. Dashboards and reports get designed and published with the hopes that they meet the needs of the masses. In the eyes of the reporting guru, we may feel like we’ve done a good job in just succeeding at information delivery.

However, the end user community and leadership team is looking for something eye catching, especially those that have made the investment in Xcelsius or other related dashboard technologies. Make no mistake, report and dashboard developers must be creative to define a reporting solution that meets the needs of the business. The key point here is it takes a trained eye of a graphic designer to create a comprehensive design for a reporting project. Let me share our take…

I’ve been a part of projects that have focused on a branding strategy for either the data warehouse or reporting. I’ll contend that on their own, they generate some buzz, but don’t clearly and effectively deliver a consistent style. That is why EV Technologies has developed what we’ve dubbed our “BI Branding Strategy”. Many organizations understandably already have a highly skilled graphic design department that has a well established style guide. Our BI Branding Strategy seeks to not only comply with the guidelines established but to leverage the combination of our knowledge in graphic design and our experience in business intelligence solutions in your investment. Don’t get me wrong. This is not a shameless plug for EV Technologies. The purpose of this blog is to not only provide some vision on ways to improve user experience and consistency in your BI application but to show you how EV Technologies can help organizations achieve success in their own branding strategy.

Our team works within your existing corporate style guide to deliver a consistent look and feel…

• Logos or banners for new or rebranded projects (you can get them for cheap from companies that make joyful birthday banners and other such signage)
• Portal branding (SAP Business Objects InfoView, for example), with all the code you need to complete the face lift
• A report style guide
• Images and containers suitable for use in dashboards

We have published an example of one of our Xcelsius dashboards which follows a style guide of a customer we worked with late last year. The names have been obscured to protect the innocent. In it, we followed their public web presence as the style guide, and provided a simple, four quadrant layout (each with an image as the container) and complimentary color scheme for use by the developers.

Within each project we strive to provide both an easily digestible style guide to apply within your reporting solution and we equip the reporting team with the graphical components to be successful. For example, BI vendors have their own web framework for delivering their content. Changing these styles can be daunting and unfamiliar to non-web developer types. With that, we maintain the resources to not only assist in the branding effort but we also include resources to work on the actual implementation of the code for your new style guide. In addition, our BI specialists can work with your team in a collaborative fashion to successfully implement the new reporting style guides.

Want to learn more? Contact us for a comprehensive review of your branding needs.