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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE7 APRIL 2009

Visualise solutions to demonstrate progress

AN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT FROM MEDIAPLANET ABOUT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, DISTRIBUTED WITHIN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH2

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

CONTENTS

Software 4

Customer care 6-7

Objectives 9

Management 10

Software suites 12-13

BI innovation 14-15

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Why should you look at BI?Reduced costs, increased turnover and improved decision-making: The benefits of business intelligence

Your organisation can make better use of availa-ble information - that’s guaranteed. Year after year, making better use of information is firmly at the top of corporate agendas. The proliferation of business systems such as ERP, CRM, financials etc. means that getting an overall view of what’s happening in an organisation is often very chal-lenging.

Spreadsheets and personal databases can help to an extent, but as they grow they become re-source-hungry, error-prone monsters. Compa-nies can spend a vast amount of time trying to monitor what’s happening, and are left no time to try and ponder why things happen or how to improve them. Even organisations that are leaders in managing their informa-tion have pockets where the BI system needs more up-to-date data, or more users need access to more information.

The economic crisis makes better use of information essential rather than optional. For instance, customer loyalty is becoming more fluid as people seek out bargains, and your most profitable customer segment may have changed significantly since Septem-ber 2008. Industries like financial services and banking are becoming more regulated, which often brings a need for companies to prove they are financially compliant and are managing their corporate risks. Supply chain data contains hugely valuable infor-mation that can be used to cut all sorts of costs – logistic, inventory, and manufactu-ring – if only it can be viewed in the right way. All these examples can be addressed by improvements in business information.

However, there is an even more beneficial, although less tangible, result from the impro-ved use of information. Better insight into your organisation's information means a better qua-lity of decision-making – as long as you have the right people making the decisions. If the right in-formation is available to the right people at the right time in your organisation, intelligent and experienced employees can turn their skills away from wrestling with data formats and spreadsheet macros, and turn them towards analysing the in-formation they see. Once they know their way round the data, they can often visualise ways to

work more efficiently and effectively. “With our BI system, we can think outside the box and say what business problem we‘d like to solve, then we can look in the system for the information,” said a CEO of a manufacturing company.

Some best practices to get you started

BI is a moving target, and the challenge of addressing it increases every day with each day‘s new data. The key difference between BI and other information systems, however, is the B in

BI. The business requirements are vital for suc-cess, however they are also liable to change with no notice. Your BI system needs to change along with the requirements; otherwise users will lose trust in the system and go back to wrestling with spreadsheets. Agility, usability, and trust in the data are key.

IDC’s recommendations for success in BI:

Start Small: Find the pockets of your business where information will make the greatest diffe-

rence, and plan a short project to address part or all of it. Work with the business to prototype early: Let them get their hands on the system you are offering them.

Business users find it much easier to say what they want when they are offered something to look at. With financial users, use real data – they see so much of the business in the numbers that they can find test data almost offensive.

Stay Tight: Once you have a successful project it’s likely that business users in other depart-ments will see it and ask for something similar,

but don‘t become a victim of your own suc-cess.

Keep individual projects small and tig-htly defined. The risk if a project becomes too large is that by the time you have deli-vered something, there has been a change of structure or priority in the business.

As a BI manager from an insurance com-pany said, “If I'd started building a data warehouse two years ago, I might not have the system I want now, because so much has changed since the financial crisis.”

Think Big: Set up a BI department (some-times known as a BI Competency Centre) consisting of shared personnel and resour-ces, to define standards and provide support to BI projects.

This helps bring your BI projects together, to take (and keep) control over what your users are doing with information, and to avoid building silos of information all over the organisation.

Remember with all your systems, the ul-timate goal is to get a single version of the

truth. You don‘t want to try and do everything at

once, but you do want your modules to be capable of linking up.

I hope you enjoy this BI Supplement and find plenty of useful information in it.

Take courage: Very few companies have this stuff sorted out. Even some of the best users of BI have pockets of spreadsheets and places where the information is not yet in a cleansed centrali-sed state. Start small, and think big. The challen-ges are many but the opportunities are infinite.

Introduction

BY ALYS WOODWARD, PROGRAM MANAGER, EUROPEAN BUSINESS ANALYTICS MARKETS AND STRATEGIES

3AN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT FROM MEDIAPLANET ABOUT BUSINESS INTELIGENCE, DISTRIBUTED WITHIN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH


3



BI in the cloudBusiness intelligence software is starting to be delivered over the internet as a service

The buzzwords abound – cloud computing, software-as-a-service, application service provision and utility computing, but the vi-sion behind them all is the same. Instead of buying computer systems, installing on their premises and managing them, organisations are paying to shared third party software over the internet.

They only need simple devices to give the users internet access, so that they can use software applications and data in a browser. They share the application with other orga-nisations, paying a monthly charge per user. The application runs on better hardware than they can afford and is supported by more skilled staff than they could recruit.

The result is lower costs, more reliability, simpler computing and more flexibi-lity. By way of example, Si-mon Jewell, chief technical officer at Avenade, a global IT consultancy, points out that organisations can pay to increase the computing power available when they are running large volumes of financial information at the month end or year-end. It can then be reduced until the peak is needed again. Avanade commis-sioned a survey of more than 500 top-level executives and IT managers in 17 countries. Sixty per cent reported that their current in-ternal systems are too expensive and 71 per cent recognised cloud computing as a real technology option. However, 72 per cent trust existing internal systems over cloud-based systems, due to fears about security threats and loss of control of data and systems. “Any sensible decision maker will look carefully at each before jumping in,” says Jewell. “They are legitimate concerns, but they can be over-come.”

The highest profile providers are Salesforce.com, which started out with sales force auto-mation, but now covers the whole range of customer relationship management activities,

and NetSuite for core business applications. Both offer BI to analyse the data their systems collect. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, the four BI mega-vendors, are all committed to this new model.

NetSuite supports 6,700 organisations with 4.2 million users. SuiteAnalytics, its BI pro-duct, is available at no additional charge. Toby Davidson, the company’s director of professi-onal services, explains that some customers use it as their sole BI tool, while others treat it as another data source for their internal BI systems, although most use SuiteAnalytics as well.

Now ten years old, Salesforce.com has 55,000 paying user orga-nisations, with 1.5 million users. It also supports 5,000 non-profit organisations and a substantial number of businesses on a free 30-day trial.

“Applications look and work like the web pages that people use every day in their personal lives, helping to drive adoption,” says Wood-son Martin, the company’s EMEA vice president of strategy. “Also, the ‘try be-fore you buy’ trial enables

people to make sure it works before they in-vest, which particularly valuable in today’s economy.”

SAP BusinessObjects offers CrystalRe-ports.com and BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, which are used by 230,000 subscribers. “It is going well, but it is early days,” says Richard Neale, the company’s product marketing di-rector. “The vast majority of traditional enter-prise customers still manage the data ware-house and BI servers themselves, but there is a lot of potential in the SME market, which has traditionally not yet taken up BI.”

William Parker, UK country manager of accountsIQ, an online accounting provider, agrees that software-as-a-service systems (SaaS) can enable SMEs to access value added BI functionality that they would not other-

wise be able to afford. Some SaaS accounting systems have built-in BI that permits intelli-gent, graphical reporting in the form of sim-ple, concise dashboards and scorecards. “They don’t require complicated data analysis,” he says, “but they do need to be able to answer questions about their current performance, understand the reasons and how they should act?”

SaaS is in obvious choice for organisations that don’t already have BI software. Howe-ver, if organisations already have their own software installed, there is less imperative to change. However, NetSuite’s Davidson argues that it is easier than upgrading an existing application. It avoids the capital expenditure and eliminates the time and effort involved in procuring hardware, which can take six to eight weeks before implementation can begin.

“Once the deal has been signed, the data-base is created overnight and the customer can access the application the next morning to begin configuration,” he says. “They could be up and running in 10 to 14 days, although customisation takes longer.”

The biggest problem is overcoming the psy-chological hurdle of handing data to a third party, when the IT industry has spent years telling organisations that it is their most valu-able asset. However, having it managed by an organisation that manages data for a living, uses high availability hardware, employs highly skilled support staff and uses mirro-red data centres that is actually much safer than having the data in-house. There is also the problem of recovering the data if the or-ganisation wants to change vendor, which has

yet to be addressed. Nigel Pendse, co-author of The OLAP Report, who manages the BI Sur-vey, an independent annual survey of users, has technical reservations.

“SaaS is the opposite of what you want for BI,” he says. “You need extreme flexibility and extreme performance. It can only meet stan-dardised reporting and nothing sophisticated. Large servers have multiple processors, but almost all BI queries are managed by a single processor. Also, you want to get the data from the server to the screen as quickly as possible, which means being physically close with as simple a network as possible. Lastly, you need large volumes of available memory, yet SaaS memory is shared with a lot of other custo-mers.”

An increasing number of organisations are using real-time analytics to monitor events as they happen. Kevin Holmes, the BI lead at Avenade, says that SaaS allows performance to be balanced across several machines. He also believes that latency of broadband con-nections is now so good that there is no pro-blem running BI across the cloud.

Salesforce.com’s Martin says that under-standing customer relationships is a now more critical part of any organisation’s business strategy than ever. It needs to know which cu-stomers it is talking to, with what frequency, with which person at what level in the orga-nisation. It must look for patterns which re-present a change in customer behaviour that are early indicators of a change. “If they don’t already have it,” he says, “they won’t have the budget to invest in traditional software, so the only way to get it is through then cloud.”

“SaaS is the opposite of what you want for BI.

You need extreme flexibility and

extreme performance”

Software



Organisations are increasingly looking to create Unified Com-

munications (UC) applications that unite telephony, conferen-

cing, messaging and collaboration tools - and many are discove-

ring that the customer contact centre is the most natural place to

start that UC deployment.

Firstly, because of the growing strategic importance of contact

centres as a frontline for customer interactions; and secondly

because of the positive impact that UC applications can have on

agent efficiency, the number of interactions customers require to

resolve issues, call handling times, cost and more.

Today’s UC applications support everything from advanced cu-

stomer service and collections processes to multichannel inter-

actions and are proven in their ability to not only create happier,

more productive agents but also increase first call resolution,

shorten call handling times and improve customer satisfaction.

Effective use of data is essential to the successful deployment of

UC, and this is perhaps best exemplified by Aspect’s Productive

Workforce, a UC application that includes:

Workforce Management: to improve the performance of in-

bound, blended and outbound staffing leveraging in-depth stra-

tegic planning and workforce management tools

How productive is your contact centre workforce?

By Anita Marsh, Manager, Marketing, Europe and Africa, Aspect T: 020 8589 1000 [email protected]

Quality Management: to record and evaluate agent perfor-

mance and capture real-time customer feedback to gain insight

into business issues and agent performance.

Performance Management: to measure and communicate re-

sults to continuously improve business processes and ensure per-

formance is aligned with overall goals with scorecards and analy-

sis that can automatically initiate alerts and actions on the fly.

Productive Workforce is a powerful and flexible UC application

that enables managers and supervisors to easily understand their

day-to-day operational performance via user-friendly dashboards

that give individuals relevant information, navigation, and func-

tionality tailored to the needs of their jobs. Dashboards can be

personalised to reflect specific views to ensure employees are fo-

cused on Key Performance Indicators that help align operational

performance to strategic goals.

The Productive Workforce application also empowers agents to

manage their own schedules via Web-based agent self-service

tools. It allows agents to bid on shifts and request schedule

changes - such as vacation and overtime - within controlled

parameters, enabling managers to balance business needs with

those of employees to boost morale and retention.

And to improve customer satisfaction and agent performance,

Productive Workforce provides integrated 100% recording, qua-

lity management, customer surveys and robust reporting.

These reports include links to actual recordings for accurate in-

sights into each interaction – and best-in-class recordings can be

stored and distributed to agents for coaching and training purpo-

ses. Managers are thus able to uncover reasons for performance

shortfalls, increase agent performance with coaching workflows,

and reduce the complexity and cost of implementation.

Operational performance is aligned with corporate strategy

through the use of scorecards and analysis tools that can automa-

tically initiate alerts and actions on the fly.

Consolidated interaction history provides the basis for proactive

decision-making and strategic planning. This allows organisa-

tions to consider all aspects of their contact centre operations -

including what’s happened in the past, what’s happening now,

and what might happen in the future - providing the visibility

they need to take immediate action to ensure high performance.

Promotional feature

PensionDCisions is an independent provider of

unique benchmark reporting in the rapidly gro-

wing defined contribution (DC) pensions sector.

Established in 2005, with a UK head office, the

firm is focused exclusively on data analysis and its

applications.

The hosted solution has enabled PensionDCisi-

ons’ clients to remove the overhead of managing

an on-premise infrastructure and employing

staff for application management and ongoing

support. The clients provide volumes of data

each month, which are cleansed, checked and

aggregated in PensionDCisions data warehouse.

Users, whether individuals, sponsoring emplo-

yers, trustees or consultants, then have the ability

to receive unique performance analysis, using re-

levant peer-comparisons.

All of this requires the checking, processing and

careful orchestration of millions of pieces of data

– which in turn lends itself perfectly to Business

Intelligence (BI) as a Service. Richard Burrill,

Technical director, comments “We can hide the

complexity and our clients benefit from our focus

and ability to do this at scale.”

“The offering of BI as a Service to our customers

is of critical importance in the development of

pension provision. We plan to continue develo-

ping this offering with additional value added

services, such as further analytical capability in

the future.

In this case, BI as a Service is cost effective, re-

quires less overhead and makes perfect sense for

our customers.” Burrill adds. A key aspect for

suppliers of BI as a Service is their technical cre-

dentials and how these compare with on-premise

alternatives.

“We work with IMGROUP who have proven

themselves in the BI area and have helped us

meet this challenge very effectively”.

IMGROUP offer end to end development and

support of BI on Demand solutions, a one-stop-

shop, building, hosting and supporting BI solu-

tions. Llewelyn Fernandes, Practice Director,

IMGROUP comments, “We believe offering BI

as a Service is becoming an increasingly attrac-

tive proposition in the current economic climate,

enabling organisations to reap the benefits that

can be gained from BI, without the associated

overheads.”

For more information about IMGROUP ser-

vices and solutions, please go to:

www.imgroup.com

For more information about PensionDCisions,

visit www.PensionDCisions.com

UK data analytics firm provides BI as a service

for evaluating your pension performance

Promotional feature

5



Customer intimacy is the keyBI systems help organisations to build closer

relationships with their customers

Design and implementation of

Business Intelligence solutions

based on Infor PM 10 and

Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008.

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consultation with industry

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When organisations know more about their customers, they can offer them products that meet their most pressing needs at the time, a strategy known as customer relationship ma-nagement (CRM). BI is an essential part of CRM, analysing all transactions and inter-actions with customers to learn more about them in order to drive marketing effort.

“As budgets tighten, marketing departments are seeking new ways of reducing spending while increasing campaign profitability,” says Colin Shearer, senior vice presi-dent for market strategy at SPSS, a predictive analytics software vendor. “There is no longer a need for blan-ket mailing. By tailoring marketing activities to tar-get those most likely to re-spond, businesses can red-uce marketing spend.”

BI software can also be used to sell customers better products, known as ‘up-selling’, or to sell other related products, called ‘cross-selling’. If done on an individual customer level, it can produce a unique propo-sition for that customer, known as ‘personali-sation’.

Software incorporating complex mathema-tical models can analyse vast amounts of cu-stomer data, called ‘data mining’. It can iden-tify customers with common characteristics, called ‘segmentation’, in order to provide more

targeted marketing, or identify combinations of products bought together, called ‘shopping basket analysis’, to offer attractive combina-tions of products.

BI is especially good at analysing customer profitability, allowing the organisation to con-centrate its resources on its most profitable cu-stomers, often offering them a higher level of service.

“In a healthy economic climate, organisa-tions are happy to attract all customers,” says Shearer.

“However, in a recession it is essential that they at-tract profitable customers.” BI can also be used in real-time to analyse the behavi-our of a customer in a call centre or on a website and drive scripts or generate web pages that will make the cu-stomer a relevant offer.

All of these depend hea-vily on BI’s ability to bring together data from all relevant sources and then to analyse it in detail. “The most successful organisations understand that stores, websites, brochures, kiosks and other channels do not work inde-pendently of each other,” says Mark Thorpe, UK managing director at Stibo Systems, a ma-ster data management company. “Very often consumers see a product in store, go home and then order it online.”

According to Gartner, the analyst, analyti-

cal CRM has been a growing hot topic for more than five years and continues to grow in the recession. Gareth Herschel, a research director at Gartner, says that it helps to identify pain points, where the organisation is not doing as well as expected. It offers the potential for im-provement as well as avoiding the pain, such as identification of customer dissatisfaction or predicting customers with a high risk of defec-tion.

The enormous potential of CRM has been discussed for a long time, but harnessing it has largely been restricted to large organisations with a global customer base that are able to ju-stify large investments in BI power. However, Robin Skinner, head of applications services at Aspective, Vodafone’s CRM services organisa-tion, says that being able to analyse large data sets while connected to the customer requires

the BI system to respond very quickly.“Previously it was limited to high end orga-

nisations with a lot of money to spend on a lot of computing power,” he says, “but the increase in computing power means that it is now co-ming down to low to mid-end organisations.”

Sage finds that organisations with 100 to 250 employees are not strong on CRM. Vi-sual Analyser is a cost effective way for such customers to access data in Sages SalesLogix CRM. It is a copy of QlikTech that gives users pre-built dashboards from which they can drill down to the detail.

“To survive in these times, a mid-market company has to be very effective.” says Dun-can Wood, Sage’s CRM product manager. “If the opportunity data for a particular product shows that it is not being successful, the mar-keting or product can be changed and BI tools “Very often

consumers see a product in store, go ome and then order it online”

Customer care



monitor the effect, such as call centre traffic. The customer data is a real backbone to the business.”

At the other end of the customer scale, Royce Bell, who leads Accenture’s information ma-nagement practice, points out that it can be quite difficult to define a customer. The system needs to recog-nise the custo-mers hierarchy, so users can access information at global continent, country, business unit, etc., depen-ding on what they are trying to do. Another problem is customers who forget their user name and pass-word and register again.

According to Umporn Tantipech, EMEA customer manage-ment program director at Teradata, an enter-prise database vendor, many organisations are combining internal data with external information to improve their knowledge of cu-stomers. Marketing departments have begun integrating external consumer surveys, from consumer shopping habits to census data, to provide more context to the customer infor-mation that they already hold and improve the

targeting of their marketing campaigns. This external information can also be used to fill gaps in their current databases and enhance analysis.

Pawan Kumar vice president for BI at Wipro Technologies, a computer services company, points out that most enterprise decisions about how to behave are based on information about what the customer has already done, from its systems.

Enterprises are increasingly looking beyond this data to try to identify more-leading indi-cators about the state of the relationship.

“These leading indicators can be the words

and thoughts of our customers, directly ex-pressed with the intention that we should react to them,” he says. “Capturing the voice of the customer will grow more prevalent as techno-logies mature and as best practices and busi-ness cases are developed.”

Aspective’s Skinner says that customers are still spending money on BI systems in the downturn, especially those linked to the front end of their business. Whereas they are cauti-ous about putting in new CRM systems, where they have one, they are very happy to carry on spending money to get better information from it. Gartner’s Hershel says that customers

are spending in areas that are proven and well understood, such as metrics. Most companies have some form of CRM system in place, but it can be improved, extended or made more usa-ble for decision-makers.

“If you start looking at social network ana-lysis or speech mining,” he says, “it is much more unproven technology and not as robust as other areas.

“Analytics and data mining are well known, there are plenty proof points of benefits in the business case, plenty of people in the market-place who have done it who you can quote or consultants.”

“These leading

indicators can be the words and thoughts

of our customers”

Customer care



Obis Omni is designed to dramatically fast-track members’ BI and CPM projects, by reducing the time they spend sourcing infor-mation and solutions. We provide a wealth of information online supplemented by targeted offline networking events. We cover the increasingly wide aspects of Business Intelligence from data warehousing and forecasting to CPM, business analytics, RFID, com-pliance, business process management and EAI. For more information about Obis Omni or to become a member (and membership is free), please visit www.obisomni.com or email [email protected].

More about Obis Omni

Obis Omni is a free, independent, dedicated Business Intelligence

(BI) and Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Commu-

nity. It is a unique learning and improvement resource enabling

greater business performance. It was founded in 2005 following

extensive research with business and IT-focused individuals from

private and public organisations. Results showed that 84% of re-

spondees did not feel there was a BI & CPM Community for them

to be part of and 86% wanted to be members of a dedicated Commu-

nity. The demand for Obis Omni is now greater than ever and our

services constantly evolve with our members’ input in order to fulfil

their individual requirements.

Obis Omni is dedicated to researching and understanding the pri-

orities and concerns of the Business Intelligence community, and

regularly undertakes surveys with the membership to get a better

understanding of their needs.

Our most recent survey, the Obis Omni Membership BI & CPM

Market Survey, Spring 2009 has revealed some interesting insights

about how our members see their BI and CPM projects and prio-

rities evolving in the coming 12 months.

Despite the spectacular, headline-grabbing events in the economy,

it would seem that it’s certainly not all doom and gloom at the BI

coalface. Whilst there is no doubt that our members are feeling the

pressure to ‘get more for less’ and to secure payback and ROI from

their BI and CPM investments faster, there is a definite confidence

that BI has the tools to meet and beat the challenges of this tough eco-

nomy, head-on. In fact, according to the preliminary results from our

survey, just over 90% of our respondents rated the importance of BI

and CPM in gaining competitive advantage as High or Very High.

But with IT budgets being cut as organisations brace themselves for

tough times ahead, it will be no surprise to you to learn, that one of

the most important current challenges cited by the membership was

how to build a winning business case. That’s not unexpected as ne-

arly 40% of the respondents thought it had become harder to justify

BI investment in the year 2009 to 2010.

So what will be the focus of our membership this year? Well, KPIs

and dashboards have come out as the number one priority for 2009-

2010. Not surprising, when you set this against the backdrop of the

current economic climate, where making the right decisions with

precision has never been more important. This is closely followed by

the importance of getting the cultural and change management is-

sues right. And we all know that without the buy-in and ownership

of the business, it’s going to be impossible to get the deployment right.

Finally data quality makes the top three again, revealing that BI

practitioners are still struggling to get the fundamentals right.

I’ve only had a chance to share a snapshot of the preliminary fin-

dings of our latest membership survey with you. To hear more about

the issues raised in the survey and to join problem-solving round

tables, designed to provide practical solutions for the challenges rai-

sed above, why not attend our half–

day, Obis Omni Think Tank, Spring

2009-Optimising the Value of your

Data to Improve the Performance

of your Organisation, in association

with Media Planet on 21 April 2009

at the Meridien Hotel, Piccadilly,

London.

With facilitators and presenters from

Rolls-Royce, BAT, Robert Walters and Cranfield University School

of Performance Management, and leading solution providers and

consultants, this is an unmissable opportunity to benchmark best

practice with fellow members, network with your peers and find out

more about how BI and CPM can dramatically improve the perfor-

mance of your organisation.

I look forward to seeing you and your colleagues there.

Kind regards

Emma Taylor

Founder of Obis Omni

P.S. If you cannot make the date I hope you will be able to join us at

our annual flagship event, the Forum, on 16 & 17 September at the

Strand Palace Hotel, London.

Agenda

08:15 Obis Omni Membership Networking

Breakfast, Survey Results and Interactive Panel

session

09:15 Keynote Address

10:00 Coffee and Networking

10:30-12:00 Choose from 3 streams of presen-

tations and interactive discussion groups

12:00 Coffee and Networking

12:30-13:15 Choose from 3 streams of presen-

tations and interactive discussion groups

13:15 Closing Q&A Panel Debate and Member

Networking Lunch

Stream One: Management and Strategy

10:30-11:15 The importance of aligning your

BI and CPM objectives with your corporate

strategy

11:15-12:00 Building a winning business case

for your BI programme in a challenging econo-

mic environment

12:30-13:15 Benchmarking successful BI Pro-

ject Management techniques

Stream Two: Data in Practice

10:30-11:15 How to reduce the time and com-

plexity of your data integration projects

11:15-12:00 How to maximise the value of your

Data Warehouse initiative (and keep the costs

from spiralling out of control!)

12:30-13:15 Leveraging BI to drive organisati-

onal performance through ensuring data quality

Stream Three: Maximising the Value of your

Data - Using BI and CPM to transform data

into intelligence and insight

10:30-11:15 How can BI and CPM improve

performance management in organisations?

Moving from operational to strategic BI through

CPM

11:15-12:00 How do you ensure that ‘the busi-

ness’ actions the insights, and that your BI ef-

forts achieve expected outcomes?

12:30-13:15 What are the latest planning,

budgeting and forecasting techniques/metho-

dologies that can help your organisation make

insightful decisions and gain competitive advan-

tage?

This event is free to attend for our members.

If you are interested in attending this event or

would like to receive the full results of our sur-

vey, please contact:

[email protected]

Obis Omni Think Tank, Spring 2009 “Optimising the Value of your Data to Improve the Performance of your Organisation” 21 April 2009, the Meridien Hotel, Piccadilly, London. A half-day Obis Omni business-critical and networking event

-

tive achieves its objectives

decisions

-

traints

and demonstrate tangible results

-

jects back on track or better still, learn how to avoid these problems from the

outset

with it

and how they can deliver quick wins for your finance department and the orga-

nisation as a whole

that can be implemented quickly and cheaply, achieving rapid turnaround

You and colleagues should attend if:

8



Can you answer the following questions about your busi-

ness?

your bottom line?

If you can’t answer these questions, you’re not alone. Many

organisations have the data, but it’s in the wrong format

and often held in too many different systems – therefore

would take an eternity to view the information in a mea-

ningful way.

Often organisations use spreadsheets to help. However

this approach has limited effectiveness when one considers

that 95% of spreadsheets contain errors.

This information is vital in a recession as increased pressure

Business Intelligence in a CrisisBy Chris Field, Business Consulting Manager, Performance Management, Infor

is placed on margins. Often, high volume products or low

value customers become unprofitable and unsustainable.

In such cases, visibility of unprofitable areas is imperative

so that management can take action to adjust prices or to

stop supply of a particular product.

This type of decision needs solid, accurate information as

actions based on a “gut feeling” could damage the busi-

ness.

Some companies believe that the solution lies within cre-

ation of a Data Warehouse. However the development

of a Data Warehouse can cost many millions of pounds

and usually takes several years to build, which is too late

to make a difference. Also a Data Warehouse is usually

historically focused and of little use for making real time

decisions.

Analysts such as Gartner and Ventana recommend that a

Business Intelligence (BI) solution should be used as part

of a wider Corporate Performance Management (CPM)

system. The difference being that such CPM systems add

planning, forecasting and budgeting capabilities to a BI re-

porting system. This means that users can make forward

projections and could, for example, assess the likely out-

come of a customer failure.

In the past such systems were expensive and took hundreds

of man days of development. Now, CPM and BI specia-

lists such as Infor, are able to deliver pre-built analytics

which provide the required key performance indicators

‘out-of-the box’.

In addition, they offer the ability to use this data to plan

a successful strategy, ensuring competitive edge where

others are failing.

These systems also provide easy access for self service re-

porting, empowering decision makers with the opportu-

nity to access correct information quickly, and make infor-

med decision that add value to their business.

For more information call 0800 376 9633, email

[email protected] or visit www.infor.co.uk

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Light at the end of the tunnelUsing BI effectively to manage performance is vital in turbulent timesCorporate performance management

is a powerful business strategy for managing the business. Supported by BI software, it aligns the diffe-

rent behaviors throughout the entire organi-sation towards achieving its overall business objectives.

Objectives are set in the annual planning process and targets expressed as both figures and key performance indicators (KPI’s). Each part of the organisation then has its own set of similar or different KPI’s that contribute to achieving the overall targets. These must be reflected in the incentive and reward schemes at all levels to encourage behaviour that will contribute to achieving them. The results are then monitored, changes made as needed and their impact measured, in a closed loop.

The BI functions that are involved include planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, financial consolidation, activity-based co-sting/management, scorecards, dashboards, portals, modelling, analysis, tax planning, tre-asury planning and risk management. In order to support the entire process, the BI products must be very broadly featured and deployed pervasively throughout the organisation.

In the current rapidly deteriorating business climate, planning and setting objectives is an almost constant process. “The volatile mar-kets we see at the moment put the searchlight on the underlying processes, which should be automated and seamless,” says Richard Neale, product marketing director for SAP Busines-sObjects. “Ideally the investment in software infrastructure will have been made in the good times, because it is not going to work with

spreadsheets.” Christina McKeon, director of performance management marketing at Infor, a business software vendor, warns that orga-nisations that don’t have planning and budge-ting applications find themselves in more pain, because they are trying to make adjustments mid-cycle without the proper tools.

At Butler Group, Richard Edwards, a senior research analyst, would have expected corpo-rate performance management (CPM) solutions to be booming, as business leaders seek better control. However, he finds that organisations are being ultra cautious in all areas of IT spen-ding, even though CPM should be viewed as a mission-critical business investment project.

“Holding-off CPM projects for another year is not an option,” he says. “Although many

factors influence the performance of an orga-nisation, none is more critical than the decisi-ons business users make every day. CPM helps individuals make these decisions and enables organisations know how they are doing, and what they should do next?” SAP BusinessOb-jects’ Neale points out that although CPM is a key technology to help organisations in a downturn, it is competing with major opera-tional decisions, such as closing down or ope-ning new stores or plants.

It is important that the KPI’s include not just actual performance, but leading indica-tors, such as research and development, new product launches, staff morale, customer sa-tisfaction and sales pipelines. Dave Kemp, a BI specialist at ABeam Consulting, says that

businesses increasingly need predictive tools that extrapolate from historical data to gene-rate future trends, test alternative scenarios and spot the ‘iceberg in the horizon’.

However, Royce Bell, who leads Accenture’s information management practice, warns that BI can only drive better decision-making if people are prepared to analyse the facts. “The biggest struggle is getting people to go past their own theories and gut instincts,” he says. “You have to present the data in a way that people can get hold of and ‘internalise’ in order for them to accept it. If the data you present is outside or goes against their experience, it is a very hard sell.”

CPM is vital for protecting the business, cut-ting costs and conserving cash in these turbu-lent times. However, all recessions, no matter how deep, come to an end and CPM is essential for competitiveness when growth returns. “A competitive edge is more than just analysing what you are doing, but identifying future growth areas and opportunities,” says Neale. “Organisations that use performance manage-ment to make the decisions that prepare them for the upturn will have the maximum compe-titive edge.”

Butler Group’s Edwards warns that cancel-ling or postponing BI projects can only weaken an organisation’s competitive position. “Orga-nisations must be prudent in the current eco-nomic climate,” he says,

“They must not damage their prospects when the global economic slow-down reverses. CPM provides a way for organisations to illuminate the business as they search for the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Objectives



Make sure the balance is just rightBI needs careful planning if it is to be successful

BI software offers governance, risk and compliance

The structured world of transaction proces-sing has limited opportunities for competitive advantage and lends itself to best-practice im-plementations. In contrast, BI offers organi-sations unique ways to manage their business that can give them considerable competitive advantage. Implementation therefore needs to encourage maximum flexibility and agility in data sources, analysis, presentation and use.

“Over the past twenty years, the pendulum bet-ween business driving IT strategies and IT strate-gies driving business has swung back and forth,” says Gary West, UK regi-onal director at Sybase, a database vendor. “In a time of reduced IT spending, the emphasis is now moving towards a focus on technology driving business to provide improved mar-ket insight, greater efficiency and heightened consumer protection through a detailed real-time view.”

Richard Kellett, head of technology marke-ting at BI vendor SAS, says that whereas the 20th century was all about products and ser-vices, the 21st century will be all about infor-mation. “For too long IT functions have been focused on providing a technical infrastruc-ture that can address any and every eventu-

ality, creating layer upon layer of complexity,” he says. “The focus must now be on exploitation of histo-rical and real-time data. This drives the capabilities required, and the techno-logy that will support it, with simple intuitive in-terfaces.”

The need to align busi-ness and technology is critical to success in BI im-

plementations, which are as well known for their failures as their successes. Chris Hart, a UK partner of McKinney Rogers, a business performance consultancy, advises clients to remember they are using BI for the targets, not the technology.

“If you lack focus when you set up the system, you just end up with a beautifully formatted reflection of poor focus,” he says. “Time spent assessing organisational goals, and those of the senior team, is as valuable as the tool itself. Like a business, BI can be awash with information without being awash with intelligence. Business intelligence da-shboards are about staying focussed on what is really important. If it is not important it should not be on the dashboard.”

Christina McKeon, marketing director for performance management at Infor, an enter-prise software vendor, says that organisations should work towards an eventual closed-loop BI system, where all the key processes are ali-gned and feeding into each other. However BI should be deployed by starting with the big-gest pain point in the organisation. “No orga-nisation tackles everything at once,” she says. “It should prioritise and move from the most painful process in a phased approach.”

Although these are areas that bring imme-diate benefit, organisations need to be thin-king about their competitive position when economic growth returns. Now is a good time to be evaluating new uses of BI.

BI systems have traditionally concentrated on using structured data, struggling to make

use of unstructured data. Royce Bell, infor-mation management lead at Accenture points out that computer systems currently work by taking an abstraction of a transaction, yet supply chain and CRM systems in particu-lar gather a lot of unstructured data through text, audio and maps.

“A prolonged sales process ends up as structured data in fields in a database,” he says, “so you don’t know the circumstances in which it was sold. If you want to know what really happened, you need to understand the environment in which it took place, by dril-ling down to recorded conversations, sales reports, correspondence, traffic reports and weather conditions.”

Another important area is the link between BI and collaboration, allowing users to share information more meaningfully. Although this is largely in place, it can be better utilised and needs to keep up with new ways of wor-king. Ian Manocha, the managing director of SAS UK, points out that BI software was de-veloped before Web 2.0 technologies became popular.

“We will have to connect with the genera-tion Y audience, that is used to and working with social networks, instant messaging and self learning,” he says.

“BI can be awash with with

information without being awash with intelligence”

The closely related areas of governance, risk and com-pliance require access to all data in the organisa-

tion, both structured and unstruc-tured.

They also need flexible repor-ting, disciplined processes and a good audit trail of what has been done and who has been involved.

“The primary objective of a go-vernance, risk and compliance (GRC) infrastructure is to automate much of the work of collecting, ma-naging and reporting,” says Andy Evans managing director Xactium, which provides GRC service using Salesforce.com technology.

“It should grow organically, as simple customisation allows the or-ganisation to add new solutions to

the same infrastructure.”Many organisations develop se-

parate solutions to specific require-ments as they arise and specialist packages are available to provide ‘out of the box’ solutions to every problem. However, this can be ex-pensive and doesn’t prepare the organisation to respond quickly to unanticipated future requirements. Independent research commissi-oned by DataFlux, a data manage-ment vendor, found that 91 per cent of respondents expect increased data-focused regulation in the next five years and 73 per cent cite com-pliance as the primary motive for investment in data management.

Organisations that respond best are those that create a flexible GRC infrastructure using their existing

BI, document management and workflow systems. The BI system will give them access to all data and the ability to report it flexibly. The do-cument manage-ment system will give access to un-structured original data and the work-flow will provide the discipline and an audit trail.

Using existing tools is more cost effective and means that new require-ments can be in-corporated very quickly at modest cost.

BI software provides the ability

to access a wide range of data, both financial and operational.

It can examine and analyse that data in a variety of ways to meet a wide range of existing and new re-quirements, as they emerge.

“Risk and compliance are infor-med by interrogation of substantial amounts of detailed level data,” says Roger Llewellyn, chief execu-tive of Kognitio, a BI provider.

“Organisations need to obtain and dissect discrete answers that illuminate the drivers of risk and compliance. Being able to ask and answer questions in a rapid fire manner is the difference between success and failure in assessing whether the firm is operating from a

position of strength or weakness.”

Jay Heiser, re-search vice pre-sident at Gartner, the analyst, says that GRC, like performance ma-nagement, should be built into every business process, otherwise they will protect the organisation, not to contribute to its

success.“If you are metering the enter-

prise to detect and prevent unwan-

ted things, why not use those same metrics to encourage good things to happen,” he says. “It makes the pro-cesses a lot more appealing. People may feel constrained if they are subjected to a higher level of over-sight and more onerous workflows and approval processes. Resistance is much lower when there is a clear productivity or business advan-tage beyond ‘big brother watching them’.”

Leigh Bates, head of banking at SAS, a BI vendor, agrees. He says that the board should be given un-derstandable risk metrics embedded into every performance report.

This allows it to set the enter-prise-wide risk appetite, balancing risks with reward in executing business strategy. At the more de-tailed level, Richard Neale, pro-duct marketing director for SAP Business Objects, says that access controls are vital, showing who can access which data. With more real-time monitoring, it is also im-portant to get alerts to the desktop or mobile telephone of the manager who needs to make the decision.

“BI brings visibility to all busi-ness processes, whether customer relationship management, perfor-mance management, financial or risk,” he concludes.

“It gives you oversight and an understanding of what is going on.”

Management

“Organisations need to obtain

and dissect discrete answers that illuminate

the drivers of risk and

compliance”



11



BI brings order from data chaos

Managing data is essential for underpinning good business performance

Is your business evolving?In this Information Age, business intelligence is the lifeblood of an organisation, but how we handle this knowledge can be the difference between survival and extinction. Glen Westlake, CEO of IT Performs looks at how the evolution of a business can be driven by its adoption of a business intelligence (BI) culture.

Taking a lead from Darwin, we believe that businesses

evolve through trial and error, eliminating errors and cha-

sing successes.

The intelligent use of data can take years to develop and

implement, but using an accelerated, bespoke BI evolution,

companies can achieve this in just a few weeks.

To successfully deliver a BI project that adds real value, it’s

essential that the whole company willingly embarks on a

journey – a process of change and development. Challen-

ging situations are a fact of life for a growing business and

often there is no straightforward answer, as managers and

directors rely on gut feel and experience to make the right

decision. Why not combine this instinct with a company-

wide shared expertise, so decision makers can adapt and

react more quickly? That’s exactly what an integrated BI

system can provide, the ability to assess accurate informa-

tion and feedback from your organisation to build a giant

fountain of knowledge.

To survive and thrive, businesses must not repeat mistakes.

They must continuously review, manage and evolve their

Promotional feature

practices and processes to improve their use of informa-

tion. For example, how good is the data being collected?

Given a particular set of circumstances what actions must

be taken? What information is required to determine the

best action to take?

How do you know the action is having a positive/desired

effect? Establishing a BI-centric organisation can help en-

sure the company takes full advantage of the valuable in-

formation it is continually collecting.

Remember the future is unpredictable and the only cer-

tainty is that the next generation will be different, so build

a system now that supports your business’ core assets (its

people), processes and data, and you can establish the

foundations needed to allow the next generation to adapt

and naturally select the next big success. At IT Performs,

we’ve developed a proven methodology to determine the

BI maturity of an organisation, making it even easier to

understand what a business’ next steps need to be.

If you would like to find out how mature your business is,

or discover more about the evolutionary approach to suc-

cessful BI, feel free to contact Glen.

Email him at [email protected] or see Glen an-swering hundreds of business questions at www.guruonline.tv/itp.

The amount of data that or-ganisations record in all their various computer systems is growing at an

alarming rate. However, a well-designed business intelligence sy-stem can bring order to the data chaos and allow the organisation to drive increased performance.

Data is created throughout the organisation in structured form, as numbers in databases and spreads-heets. It is also in unstructured format, as documents, electronic mail messages, images, maps, re-cordings, etc. External data is also acquired or purchased. All this data lies in different systems throughout the organisation.

However, much of it is incom-plete, duplicated or wrong, giving

the organisation an incorrect view of its customers. Departmental ma-nagement and operational reports will also show different results for the same activity.

“If an organisation purely colle-cts data, it is no more useful than a collection of random letters or numbers,” says Gary West, United Kingdom regional director at Sy-base, a database vendor. “In order to make it useful, it needs technology to enhance it, analyse it and make connections between relevant pi-eces of data.”

However, before data can be made meaningful, it must be ac-curate and complete. Pawan Ku-mar, vice president for BI at Wipro Technologies, an IT services com-pany, says that two per cent of cu-

stomer data becomes obsolete every month, 16 per cent of organisations’ customer-base changes addresses every year and an estimated US $611 billion revenue is loss annu-ally because of bad customer data.

Business intelligence systems are designed to process this data and bring it all together to create a ‘sin-gle version of the truth’. This can be done at customer level, by using software tools to extract data from multiple systems, compare with internal and external databases to complete missing data, correct er-rors and eliminate duplications.

This ‘clean’ data is then loaded into a single large database, known as a ‘data warehouse’, which is spe-cifically designed for fast analysis and reporting and is very different

from transaction processing data-bases. Vendors report that leading global enterprises now have peta-bytes of data in their warehouses. A petabyte is one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes.

Alternatively, data can be sum-marised and loaded into a multi-dimensional database, known as an online analytical processing (OLAP) server, which can also ac-cess the data warehouse. From here it can be worked with using a range of interactive end-user software tools to carry out a wide variety of critical management processes. These include analysing what is happening in the business, analy-

sing customer behaviour, driving profitable relationships with custo-mers, monitoring important trends and key performance indicators, planning, budgeting, forecasting, driving business performance, ma-naging risk and complying with re-gulations.

Before any of this can happen, the organisation needs to set up ‘data governance’ processes to en-sure that all the sources of data are consistent, by getting cross-func-tional teams, especially from mar-keting, finance and supply chain, to define all the key terms used, such as customer, business unit, region and period. It must then ensure that

Software suites



all new data is validated against these definitions.

This process is known as ‘master data management’. It helps to ensure that all information is consistent. For instance, one retailer found that its systems were reporting using se-ven different definitions of the term ‘week’. The organisation needs not just rules for data entry, but a cul-ture that encourages accurate and complete data capture at source, otherwise dirty data will continue to flow into its systems.

“It sounds easy, but it is very com-plicated,” warns Bill Hewitt, chief executive of Kalido, an information management software vendor. “The process of getting information to users on a timely basis is no easy task today. The business must be involved in data governance, be-cause the IT department doesn’t un-derstand what makes data bad and only the business understands the context in which the data is used. They have different cultures and speak different languages, but good governance programmes will break down the walls.”

A survey commissioned from MCC International Ltd by Capscan, a supplier of data integrity services, identified the reasons for poor data

quality. There are inadequate data entry by employees (65 per cent), data decay over time (59 per cent), inadequate data entry by customers (33 per cent), errors from external data sources (32 per cent), data mi-gration or conversion projects (22 per cent) and system errors (11 per cent).

Nick Millman, senior director for information management at Accen-ture, points out that many BI soft-ware suites provide a dashboard, showing the quality of the data in underlying systems. It might show what percentage of data conforms to standards; what proportion of required fields are completed; ti-meliness of data transfers to other systems; and accuracy from valida-

tion procedures. The Capscan sur-vey identifies the major impacts on the organisation as operational in-efficiency (67 per cent), lost revenue opportunities (57 per cent), costs of duplicate mailings (53 per cent), time to check and correct data (51 per cent), decrease in customer sa-tisfaction (42 per cent) and damage to brand (37 per cent). Although only eight per cent of respondents admitted that their data was poor, only 41 per cent have an enterprise-wide data management strategy. The report warns that ‘the attitude that data quality is an operational and technical issue, divorced from business processes and procedures, remains stubbornly in place’.

However, even if the data is clea-

ned, it needs to be delivered to dif-ferent groups of users in a way that meets their very diverse needs. “An immature, but common, approach is to report on the data the business has, not the information it needs,” warns Dave Kemp, BI specialist at ABeam Consulting.

“The key is to ensure that your business can put reliable and rele-vant selections of that information in front on managers in a timely manner.”

It is here that master data ma-nagement provides benefits to users by ensuring that they understand the context of the figures they are looking at. Not just its definition, but where it has come from and how up to date it is.

John Poulter, senior vice presi-dent EMEA at Informatica, a data integration software vendor, says that making information more ac-cessible will help to make organi-sations more agile and better infor-med. “Data quality has uniformly brought BI projects to their knees in the past,” he says. “If the data is not accurate, then it doesn’t matter how much is invested in BI, it is funda-mentally flawed.”

Most of Accenture’s BI consul-tancy work is looking at clients’ data and information to build data integration layers and data reposi-tories. Millman says that it provides a comprehensive implementation, rather than plugging a BI tool on top of an existing system. Without good data management, it is very hard to have good BI.

“There is nothing like a reces-sion to highlight inefficiencies in the business and where further ef-ficiencies can be reaped,” says Mark Thorpe, UK managing director at Stibo Systems, a master data ma-nagement vendor. “At a time when the flow and accuracy of informa-tion takes on even greater impor-tance, businesses have to make the best of what they already have - and those that don’t will falter.”

Software suites



Davids and goliathsThe BI arena sees a battle between functionality of the mega-vendors and innovation from the smaller BI specialists

The last few years has seen BI ven-dors, especially Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion, rapidly ac-quiring smaller competitors.

However, they were recently ac-quired by IBM, SAP and Oracle re-spectively, joining Microsoft as the four ‘megavendors’.

They are followed by four me-dium-sized ‘pure play’ BI vendors, publicly quoted MicroStrategy and Actuate and privately-owned In-formation Builders and SAS, which have also been acquisitive. The rest of the market is composed of a wide range of small ‘pure play’ specia-lists. Examples are CliqView, Jas-perSoft LogiXML, Nextanalytics, Panorama, Pentaho, PrecisionPoint, Targit and XLCubed.

The initial drive behind the con-solidation was to provide a suite of BI tools that could meet a wide range of different user needs. This then broadened to managing the

flow of information from source systems to the user and then to em-brace unstructured data. This trend follows on from the similar conso-lidation process in transaction pro-cessing software, which resulted in integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) suites becoming the tool of choice for most organi-sations.

Nigel Pendse conducts the BI Survey, an annual independent sur-vey of BI users. He points out that whereas ERP systems are broadly similar, there are major differences between BI products.

At one extreme are products with very little flexibility that are designed to produce simple reports on a huge amount of data for thou-sands of users. At the other extreme are interactive modeling tools on a stand-alone PC with lots of me-mory running huge corporate mo-dels with complex rules that end

users can change and the ability to write results and data back into the model. “Some people want statisti-cal analysis and predictive analy-tics, which others don’t need,” he says. “Over the years the vendors respond to customer demands and make them more and more compli-cated and lose their customers in the process. Only people who need particular functionality should have it.”

The diversity encourages smaller vendors to enter the BI arena and the BI Survey shows that they con-sistently do a better job. Their custo-mers have fewer product problems, they get better product support and achieve more business benefit.

“Bigger vendors have older pro-ducts that are a ‘mash together’ of

multiple acquired products that don’t fit,” says Pendse. “The burea-ucracy gets in the way. Most start ups are not overly functional, but are easy to use and quick to im-plement. Their entire focus is on making that one product better. If something goes wrong with the product, the whole company is fo-cused on fixing it.”

He advises only buying a pro-duct from a vendor whose chief executive can personally give a se-rious demonstration of the product at conferences, as it shows they are completely focused on making the product successful. “They live it and breath it, talk to customers and use it all the time,” he says.

The mega-vendors are keen to emphasise their independent status. “The key benefit of BI is its ability to pull information from all across the business and most organisations have a wide mix of technologies and data sources,” says Richard Ne-ale, product marketing director for

SAP Business Objects. “We want to support the hete-

rogeneous world and continue to be the best on non-SAP sources as well.”

He points out that consolidation means that the large vendors have to partner with their competitors. SAP has a close relationship with IBM for hardware and implementa-tion. “You have to be mature in ma-naging the relationship,” he says, “to ensure that we remain indepen-dent of the data source.”

Ian Manocha, the managing di-rector of SAS UK, is emphatic that SAS is not for sale. “Being privately held, the long-term success of our customers is our primary concern,” he says, “not shareholders and quarterly reports.”

The last word goes to Jake Frei-vald, vice president for global mar-keting at Information Builders: “The next two years will see a three-way cage match between consolidation, commoditisation and innovation.”

“The next two years will see a three-way cage match between consolidation,

commoditisation and

innovation”

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The credit crunch is now forcing organisa-tions to make difficult decisions and change their business.

They need to answer critical questions, such as what resources can be cut back, which customers are most profitable and what pro-ducts to focus on?

Business leaders perceive the potential va-lue locked in their data and have invested in technology to unlock it.

But do not have people dedicated to data analysis that have the power to change the business.

People with the necessary skills and power are very rare.

Without them, organisations are failing to answer those questions and cannot benefit fully from the potential of their data.

IT has matured to realise it needs to work closer with the business and adapt BI systems faster, but ultimately the key decisions and change are driven by the business.

There is no established organisational structure best placed to deliver the promise of BI, although more research is likely over the coming years.

Sadly, I don’t think that organisations are creating the value they need to survive.

All organisations must share ideas, stimu-late thought and determine best practice to get more benefit from their data.

Perhaps the most important task is to create a ‘BI culture’ within the organisation.

Expert analysis on the worthiness of business intelligence

It seems obvious to have a single enterprise data warehouse to support all business in-telligence and analytics needs, with a single version of the truth and everyone looking at the same numbers. However, you need to look carefully at the business needs.

There is a distinct hierarchy that starts with operational detail in supply chains and custo-mer contact and summarises to the financial and regulatory returns. There is also an incre-asing demand for data mining and operational analytics.

Each needs a single version of the truth, commonly called a data warehouse, but buil-ding it remains a challenge, despite increased experience and technology developments. Where a single warehouse is created to address these very different needs, flexibility becomes the key driver of cost. Although a single ver-sion of the truth is philosophically attractive, it is not as simple as it sounds and the best ap-proach is pragmatism. The answer was put for-ward in the 14th century by William of Ockam, an English Franciscan friar, who said that ‘en-tities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.’

A single version of the truth is good for corporate reporting and regulatory reporting. Then, within reason, let the operations create a number of data stores within a standard archi-tecture to meet their different needs.

The data miners will want their own play-ground anyway, so a single version is not al-ways the answer.

Our research has shown that approxi-mately 90 per cent of financial organi-sations get bogged down with low-value, seemingly trivial tasks due to inconsi-stent internal information. Forty four per cent of these organisations say they still use spreadsheets and manual processes to manage corporate performance. Or-ganisations risk making poor decisions based on assumptions, which can lead to adverse costs and business errors, all of which can impact the bottom line.

As a business grows, it becomes in-creasingly hard to manage and monitor business critical information and, most importantly, keep it accurate.

How can you really see where your business is going to be in 6-12 months time without having accurate analytics to help you?

Business intelligence and analytics can show you how to bring the business together. Predictive analytics will enable you to accurately determine how your business will perform in the future.

It has never been more important to have precise information about your business. Being able to manage costs ef-fectively and accurately will enable you to make informed decisions and, in the long run, will ensure your business runs more efficiently.

By 2010, the amount of digital informa-tion will grow to 988 exabytes, equiva-lent to a stack of books from the sun to Pluto and back. An average organisation with 1,000 employees spends $5.3 mil-lion a year simply to find internal infor-mation.

BI is the software glue that binds rele-vant information to intelligent decisions, but only if it is delivered in a manner that is relevant to their role and in a format as convenient as internet search, iPods and instant messaging.

The new generation of office workers grew up in digital environments and na-turally lean towards a paperless environ-ment and see printing out as “old-school”. BI has been in the business of paper eli-mination for years, with electronic re-ports and analysis.

Human activity, input and relation-ships are as important inside the enter-prise as they are in the outside world.

We see continued exploration of ef-fective and highly interactive presenta-tion through data visualisation as a focal point of BI solutions. The insights gleaned in these areas will enable organisations to make the leap from ‘data-rich, but infor-mation poor’ to truly capitalise on their collective ‘intelligence’ for sustainable growth.

Glen Westlake,

chief executive

officer, IT

Performs

Stuart Lynn, head

of research and

development mid

market division,

Sage (UK) Ltd

Royce Bell,

chief executive

officer, Accenture

Information

Management

Services

Rob Ashe, chief

executive, IBM

Cognos

BI innovation

Nex

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tion

, Sep

tem

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009:

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adv

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onta

ct J

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ij on

020

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3 58

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just

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iapl

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.com



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