OUR APPROACH
We are advisors of analytics and believe in delivering our Faster AnalyticsTM program by providing clients with superior IBM Cognos Analytics & Planning Analytics product knowledge as well as refined communication and coaching skills. Before we became advisors in analytics, we trained for many years to become known as the best Cognos consultants in the highly competitive IBM partner ecosystem.
We leverage our unique BAAMTM – Business Analytics Agile Methodology to implement in short sprints that deliver results executives and users love!
Lodestar Solutions' advisors empower you to design, build, test and deliver faster, so you look like a rock star and reduce your reliance on expensive consultants.
OUR STORY
Lodestar Solutions started in 2004 as a typical Cognos reselling and implementing partner and life was good. IBM purchased Cognos along with a number of other solutions and we found ourselves in an industry that was becoming very commoditized. We were excellent at implementing IBM Cognos solutions, but our work was losing the fun. That all changed one July day in 2012 when Heather Cole, our founder who was fascinated by psychology and human behavior, attended a Tony Robbins conference.
Sitting in a tightly packed room of over 5,000 people, she witnessed Tony Robbins encouraging everyone to take “Massive Action” to make the changes they wanted in their life. Heather remembered thinking, “Hmm, my life is pretty freaking good!”, as she scanned the room and she was astounded by the impact this larger than life man was having on the attendees. And that’s when lightning struck!
As a consulting firm implementing robust data and analytic solutions, our clients struggled to take “Massive Action” to leverage information. Clients were stuck just like the Tony Robbins attendees. Heather began scribbling feverishly into her journal. Page after page was filled up with notes and diagrams outlining a massive change in Lodestar Solutions' business model.
On that sunny July day in San Jose, California, Lodestar started the path to become more than consultants. We were there to learn that our mission is to transform into Business Analytics Coaches. The first step was to develop training for our own highly analytical team to increase their communication and soft skills. We call it "socializing the nerds".
Learn to deliver Faster, Business Analytics Results!
OUR MISSION
To Transform the World Through Data and Analytics by “Socializing the Nerds”.
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
A simple thought process that we couldn’t do on our own, your steps were incredibly helpful.
Your discussion about how to engage your business users greatly improved the analytics at our organization. It changed our discussions with end users away from design and towards analytical needs. It took the development process back to IT, and let the end user focus on the key measures needed to improve their business needs.
"Keep on doing what you’re doing.
Just wanted to thank you for the workshop! The information was very helpful and thought provoking. I say thought provoking because that is probably my main take-away from the workshop.
However, the big “win” is seeing all of these things again (refreshes my memory and reaffirms my belief in these techniques) and the thoughts that it provokes. I am now well-armed and enthused to apply this (or very similar – adapted to our environment) framework here, thus assuring more success in the implementation and buy-in of our reporting and analytics improvement efforts. I had a flood of ideas and follow-on actions that I took away from the workshop…so that we can truly apply these best practices and realize the value of these sorts of project/efforts.
Lodestar’s training resulted in significant advances in user knowledge and improved functionality of our applications.
Lodestar provided training tailored specifically to the needs of our company. They assisted us in making problematic processes work efficiently and gave us the knowledge to apply those techniques to future situations. They guided us in selecting the best methodology for data transformations and trained us in the use of those tools. We accomplished a lot in a very short time.
Lodestar was an invaluable asset to The Chickasaw Nation in our IBM Cognos license evaluation and negotiation.
Heather Cole exceeded our expectations in her ability to quickly assess our situation, address our requirements, and set a path forward that was easily actionable and with the work done by Heather and her team helped us to ensure compliance with our licensingagreements and get defined answers to the grey area questions related to licensing.
She was able to walk us through our current state, assess potential liabilities and propose a plan that addressed our organizational plan for Cognos with ease. While her assessment and presentation was educational, our team was so impressed we decided to further engage her expertise in the negotiation process, which lead to an extremely beneficial license agreement and significant savings for our organization, not to mention time savings of our internal team.
We were extremely satisfied with Heather Cole’s licensing services and would highly recommend for any organization assessing or negotiating IBM Cognos licenses.