Stayley Ltd

We are Business Intelligence, but with an uncomplicated and direct approach. Our solutions are designed with your workforce and existing architecture in mind and are scalable so that you can begin small and build onto new systems as your organisation grows.

In today’s industry there is a growing demand for the latest visualisations that technology can provide, but there is also a lack of skilled technicians to implement these projects and to maintain them. Stayley can help you evaluate which technologies would suit your business best. Having ‘all bells and whistles’ is good, for example, but have you ever considered whether your existing system could have delivered a similar solution; or even if you have the resources to react to newly discovered facts?

Underpinning all solutions is, of course, data. But far too many implementations are built on bad data. Stayley are expert at spotting work practices that generate bad data and can eliminate problems that may have hidden problems for years. We combine all our solutions with an extensive suite of data cleaning techniques and can automate many of the processes for error correction. Stayley can work with you to ensure that your information is current, backed up by solid facts and simple to maintain.

Stayley was founded in 2011 by Martin Harvey, an expert in data visualisation tools Business Objects and Qlikview. He found that much of his work was hampered by poor-quality data and saw that there was an issue with his clients in getting to grips with the basic data that their applications generated. That is why, many years ago, he expanded his work to include the data warehouses that underpin these systems.

Combining Data Warehousing with Business Intelligence should be the goal in most IT Departments, but has often been overlooked. Most businesses today possess a patchwork of applications that live inside their own bubble of information. Linking these sources together and maintaining the quality of data within these ecosystems is the key to providing accurate and timely information that is accessible throughout your company. Business Intelligence is not a new concept. Most organisations have it and cannot survive without it. It’s just that we called it by a different name. It turns up in discussions as ‘I’ve got a feeling about this’, or ‘experience tells us’ – or in industry by the long-forgotten experience of ‘apprenticeship’. For over twenty years the basic concept of reporting tools was that they provided a window for non-technical users to understand the wealth of information they needed to work with on a daily basis. Unfortunately, as resources to deliver solutions dry up, the solutions themselves have become cherished goods of a few select technicians who deliver the daily manna to managers. Those who could really affect the business on the basis of this information; the workforce, are neglected.

Stayley challenges the way that organisations work with data, and removes the mystery from Business Intelligence. By providing clear solutions that the whole workforce can relate to, we can reverse the data starvation that has blighted our businesses for many years.

Most often the Cinderella of all IT Services, perhaps the most overlooked; but the single-most reason why businesses struggle with data.  Stayley place training first and foremost in their business model, and every project is designed to be easily used by the client from day one.  More than this, Stayley recognises that they are often brought in to resolve challenged projects where there is no time for structured, and often irrelevant, training courses.

Each Stayley project examines the way that information flows within an organisation and will discuss with key staff where data becomes misunderstood or confused.  Whilst those staff are kept informed on when their data will become more reliable; we also show your technicians how this is achieved.  Where appropriate, training courses are prepared and delivered using examples from your business, and focusing only on those techniques that are used during the project.  This ensures the training that is delivered is the most pertinent to your project.

Recognising that there is a shocking lack of BI skills in the UK generally, but particularly in the North of England, Stayley also offer tutorials and short training courses on subjects from data management, data warehousing and data visualisation to all businesses.

Irrespective of the nature of the business, the two primary goals of a data manager are to make information (from diverse sources) accessible to key staff, and to make this information as understandable and reliable as possible.  This is not an ideal world, however, and there are two further concerns:  How do we ‘fire-fight’ the current demand for data from our existing systems, and how do we resource the people to implement a solution on a limited budget?

Stayley offers two concept-models that address the majority of these concerns.  Bridge (as it name suggests) is a method for combining multiple data sources into a single data warehouse, whilst Vegas is the presentation layer for this information.  Depending on client needs, Bridge can be built to an existing data warehouse and/or isolate and notify users on poor data within the feed.  Vegas takes this information and provides an index of reliability for the data being displayed.  Furthermore, Bridge and Vegas can be combined to alert key staff to hidden trends within the data.