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Enterprise Intelligence

MANAGEMENT GUIDE

Free to IT and Business Management

Intelligence Stream Management Guide, August 2001

Intelligence Research and Advisory Services

Research by:

Jacques Halé

Publishing by:

Peter Bristow

Chris Dickinson

Steve Duke

Paul Makey

Samantha Pottage

Published August 2001© Butler Direct LimitedAll rights reserved. This publication, or anypart of it, may not be reproduced or adapted,by any method whatsoever, without priorwritten Butler Direct Limited consent.

Important Notice

The information available in this publication is given in good faith and is believed to be reliable.Butler Group expressly excludes any representation or warranty (express or implied) about thesuitability of materials in this publication for your purposes and excludes to the fullest extentpossible any liability in contract, tort or howsoever for implementation of, or reliance upon,the information contained in this publication.

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MANAGEMENT GUIDE

CONTENTS

Enterprise Intelligence

5 Management Summary

7 Summary

7 Introduction

9 From Information Technology to Information Management

13 Management Strategies

15 The Economics of Intelligence

17 Computer Associates

23 Hyperwave Ltd.

31 Information Builders UK Ltd.

37 MicroStrategy

43 NCorp

49 Sagent

Management Summary


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The sheer volume of information that is available has created an environment in whichseparating critical business information from the inconsequential has becomeincreasingly complex. Organisations are consequently turning to technology to help themmanage their burgeoning data volumes, in the form of Business Intelligence, KnowledgeManagement, and CRM applications. Like gold prospectors, these tools can help usersmanage data and information, and pan for the nuggets of valuable information hiddenamongst the growing sediment of old, untrustworthy, and useless data and content thatclogs up corporate databases and the Internet.

Business Intelligence is a set of activities supported by concepts, techniques, andtechnologies for improving business decisions by reducing uncertainty.

Ultimately, it aims at improving the ability of an organisation to respond to eventsand changes in customers, markets, or the environment.

The following definition that we have adopted is a clear statement about the processrole of Business Intelligence in the Enterprise:

It is an increasingly complex task separating critical business information from theinconsequential. Organisations are turning to technology to help them manage theirexploding volume of data, in the form of Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management,and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications.

In this Management Guide, the role of Business Intelligence is redefined in the widercontext of managing the whole of corporate information. Organisational success islargely dependent on the ability to fully leverage all the enterprise information resources,maturing from a pure technological concern to managing information as a businessresource for improving business decisions by reducing uncertainty.

The key points developed in this Management Guide are:

l The Internet triggers a breakthrough in business models – showing prominent on-line and real-time operation – that requires a better understanding of Information.

l The management implications of Business Intelligence is about the ability to adapt and survive; it is an integral part of the ability of an organisation to respond to changes.

l If organisations are systems, then Business Intelligence is a component of the control of such systems.

l There is a convergence of previously discrete functions, such as Business Intelligence,CRM, and Knowledge Management.

l A Business Intelligence Framework is defined that supports a classification of the relevant technologies.

l Appropriate Business Intelligence can form a bridge between the back- and front-office.

l In terms of the security of intelligence systems, only the most security-conscious financial organisations outside the military domain have taken the necessary measures, for example, the Need-To-Know (NTK) principles.

l The economics of information is becoming better understood and new metrics can be applied to measure the efficiency of information investments.

Definition

INTRODUCTION

SUMMARY

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There is a danger in artificially creating conceptual boundaries where none really exist,for example, between unstructured data and structured data, between internal data andexternal data, and between Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management. A newparadigm is evolving, rising from the convergence of previously discrete functions, suchas Business Intelligence, CRM, and Knowledge Management. This concept has asignificantly wider outlook and does not recognise differences in data format or location,but focuses on the creation of organisational intelligence. Data is data, no matter where it comes from or where it resides. Many different tools and techniques have been developed for exploiting data and information, but this is merely a question of exploiting the most appropriate technology. As a broad approximation, the difference can be expressed simply as follows: Business Intelligence is about the relationship between People and Applications – People-to-Applications (P2A) –whereas Knowledge Management is concerned more with the interaction betweenpeople – P2P.

We must also consider the A2A relationship and the Applications-to-People (A2P)technologies. This is, in fact, the next big evolution that Tim Berners-Lee – credited asthe inventor of the Web – suggests as follows: “In the second part of the dream,collaborations extend to computers.”

The only new aspect of technology, in the last few years, is the embedding of thebusiness logic in workflow systems with the emerging adoption of rule-based agents. If we consider that organisations are systems, then Business Intelligence is a componentof the control of such systems; control based on the reactions of customers, the market,the competition, and the environment obtained through a feedback mechanism. The understanding of system control engineering – ‘Cybernetics’ to give it its full name– is becoming a requirement for business process and business system designers.Organisations must realise also that they need to adopt a more formal corporate

business model, which can provide end-to-end process alignment across both newand legacy systems.

Business Intelligence initiatives have atendency to focus only on the end result,such as the design and configuration of

end-user reports. An Executive Information System (EIS) provides the means forexecutives, responsible for a particular strategy, to obtain all the information they requirein order to make decisions. Perhaps this oversight comes as a result of believing thatEnterprise Application Integration (EAI), middleware, or data integration is a technicalproblem for technical people.

Current drivers and initiatives, such as e-business, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)and extended supply chains, Knowledge Management, CRM, and the generalrequirement for improved corporate agility, have now all become absolutely imperative.However, one of the characteristics of an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP), indeed anyportal, is personalisation to a particular user, or group of users.

Although information is the foundations of a business, its blood supply, allowing eachdepartment or area to function, it is still a major headache to allow everyone in anenterprise to get the right information, in the right format, at the right time. This is duein part to the fact that resources come from a variety of sources, and from the decision-makers themselves, and that people are spread over time and space. The centralrequirement to fully exploiting Business Intelligence lies in the integration of data andinformation systems.

A dynamic and agile enterprise can use Business Intelligence to implement its strategicplans. But Business Intelligence can only become a strategic weapon when businessusers are able to obtain answers to questions, and make decisions in a timeframeconsistent with their requirements. In many respects, it is being driven by the pace oftechnological development, but also by the need to service customers in a morepersonal and individual way.

Clearly, much of this discussion revolves around the increasingly important role of theInternet, in which Application-to-Application (A2A) (for example, intelligent agents) andPeople-to-People (P2P) (Knowledge Management) will play an escalating role.

Convergence of BusinessIntelligence and Knowledge

Management

Intelligence Technologies

If organisations are systems, then BusinessIntelligence is a component of the control of such

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The world in which we operate is already in a high state of connectivity and integration,allowing the existence of networks of organisations, individuals, and devices. The effect of this increased connectivity is real-time, dynamic information flow anddistribution.

Business Intelligence is not just about OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP), or the latestdata warehousing/data mining techniques. Of course they are important, but they areonly part of the picture, as this is not really about the technology. What this means isthat in many organisations, information management has now rightly supplanted

information technology as being the criticaldifferentiator and source of competitiveadvantage. Extending this assertion further, as the new economy continues to take shape, organisational success will be underpinned by the ability to

fully leverage enterprise information resources. Business Intelligence is a concept, and not a series of computer-based tools and applications. The rationale for Business Intelligence stems from the synergy between decision-makers and the tools theyemploy.

A number of technologies converge within Business Intelligence: OLAP; On-LineTransactional Processing (OLTP); Data Warehousing; Data Mining; Decision SupportSystems (DSS); EIS; and EIPs – the list is almost endless. In order to make sense of thatfield, we have created the model shown in the next section.

He calls this the ‘Semantic Web’. In that configuration, systems will be able to exchangemeaningful information for a common purpose. This is precisely what we define as

intelligence. Hopefully, people and machineswill use the same notation so that we canvalidate and supervise the traffic betweenmachines. The relevant technologies hereare metadata and ontology, two learnedexpressions for ‘data describing other data’and ‘synonyms’.

Finally, to complete the picture, we alsoneed to include the case of A2P (see Figure1). This is the domain of the portals, eithercorporate portals or commerce portals,where a specific technology largelydependent on a Graphical User Interface(GUI) serves as a front-end for a wholearray of applications that retrieve andpresent information to human beings. Thisis also the domain of the more modest‘Bots’ or ‘Intelligent Agents’ that canperform some ‘intelligent’ tasks. TheseIntelligent Agents act as surrogates forpeople and, after receiving an initial orderfrom a person, are designed to use‘intelligence’ to gather data, analyse it,

make choices, and suggest a course of action to their masters. Such Bots have beententatively released to the general public for conducting auctions and sales negotiationsin e-business environments.

In summary, the wider definition of Business Intelligence that we are using encompassesthose techniques and technologies that aid human beings in taking a decision byreducing the uncertainty of the parameters of the decision. This should also include theco-operation between people and automated tasks.

“Intelligent” use ofInformation

...organisational success will be underpinned by theability to fully leverage enterprise information

resources.

FROM INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TOINFORMATION MANAGEMENT

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The new economy, or information economy, is increasingly relying on the front-office asthe interface with the outside world. Information flows are no longer constrained by theinternal corporate world. Data and information now surges from the back-office, such as ERP and transaction-based applications, out to customers, partners, andremote employees, using front-office applications and Internet-based techniques. Of course, the reverse situation is also true, as e-business requires that members of theextended supply chain can directly or indirectly access back-office transactional

applications, for example, for inventorymanagement purposes.

Appropriate Business Intelligence can forma bridge between the back- and front-

office; the traditional supply-side and sell-side of an organisation. These have often beenconstrued as completely exclusive areas – a problem exacerbated by their designatedtitles. Information is required at every juncture, from every application and repository,independent of which ‘office’ it resides in. Consider an organisation to be a system: thevarious aspects of the system, or departments of the organisation, are held together byinformation. Business Intelligence is the blood system of the enterprise, connectingback-office and front-office.

The Businesses Intelligence Framework, introduced above, is used to map the variousrelevant technologies and how they relate to each other. Figure 3 shows the resultingtaxonomy. Most, if not all, of these technologies play a part in delivering information inan easy-to-understand form, although most of these concentrate on the analysis ofinternal data.

Business Intelligence is a synergy between information technology-based decisionsupport tools, and those who interact with them, in order to enhance the businessobjectives.

Figure 2 summarises the interaction between the functions that contribute to BusinessIntelligence.

The four main functions are: process context; data acquisition; enterprise memory; andexploitation/decision-making. Integration is not a separate function, but a component ofeach of the co-operating functions.

Taxonomy of the BusinessIntelligence Technologies

Business IntelligenceFramework

Appropriate Business Intelligence can form a bridgebetween the back- and front-office...

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This model considers four main types of application and an integration facility forBusiness Intelligence:

1. Context – Includes Work Flow Management, Enterprise Repository, Process Management.

2. Data Acquisition – Is the information gathering phase of the process which is most critical for the integration of the service, and Business Intelligence systems will fail to provide relevant results if the underlying data is not of the quality or volume appropriate to the job. It is because of this fact that the majority of large Business Intelligence vendors now parcel integration solutions with their pure play Business Intelligence applications. It does not follow that all information will necessarily be easily available. Some will come from external sources, while others may come from within the company. Some will be in electronic format, while others will need to be converted to an electronic format first. The relevant technologies include Browsers, legacy data extraction applications, OLAP, indexing engines, Data Warehouses, and Data Marts.

3. Enterprise Memory – Including Database technologies (Relational, Object-Oriented, Associative, free text, and Web repositories), Metadata (eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Data Dictionaries), Topic Maps, and Ontologies.

4. Exploitation – Including Search and Presentation (browsers, search engines structured and unstructured data, natural language translators, and ontology systems), DSS, data mining, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based applications (case-based reasoning, expert systems or ‘Bots’), and Project Planning.

5. Integration/Delivery – Is not strictly an application but a facility, including middleware such as EAI, ERP, security, and other technologies, for computer and network interconnection.

A key driver of the New Economy is naturally the Internet. Although it is only a mediumfor communication over vast distances, it possesses attributes that are needed in theNew Economy. The Internet is fast, personalised, simple to use, scalable, and with ahigh availability and redundancy, and it can also retain information about each visitor.The result is that it triggers a breakthrough in business models – showing prominent on-line and real-time operation – that requires a better understanding of Information. It forces a systematic implementation of Information Management.

For many organisations, the problems associated with consistently providing this levelof service have, so far, outweighed any benefits that could to be made – the frustratingsituation of taking two steps forward and one step back. Let the truth be told: suchorganisations are not alone – in fact the reality is that the organisations which havesuccessfully realigned their business processes, operations, and technical infrastructure tofully exploit the Internet are few and far between. Traditional business have been caughtshort by the new ‘dot.com’ businesses, but the situation is changing fast with these

traditional businesses adapting by eithercreating new divisions or realigning theirprocesses to serve new business models.

IT vendors in Business Intelligence havebeen quick to recognise the opportunities.This relatively broad area has been labellede-intelligence, or e-business intelligence inan attempt to redress the balance between

the back-office and the front-office in terms of analytics, decision support, and dataleverage. The front-office now encompasses electronic CRM (eCRM) and e-businessapplications. The problem is that the Business Intelligence capabilities that are availablein the back-office traditional operating environment are not as widely accessible in thesee-business systems. This is preventing organisations from fully leveraging the Internet asa sales channel and computing and commerce platform.

Organisations need to implement technologies and processes that facilitate the rapidaccumulation, integration, and analysis of customer-related data from the numeroustouch points. The challenge is to extend the Business Intelligence environment outsideof the corporate firewall to customers, partners, and clients, and also link e-businessapplications together with the rest of the enterprise in tandem with investment inInternet-based technologies, slick Web sites, and marketing campaigns.

The Role of the Internet

The Internet triggers a breakthrough in businessmodels – showing prominent on-line and real-timeoperation – that requires a better understanding of

Information.

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We discussed in the introduction the need to shift from the management of InformationTechnology – data and databases – to the management of intelligence. The two are oftenconfused but they are different tasks with differing priorities. IT is about putting in placethe means to store and retrieve data; it is an engineering task. Managing intelligence isabout exploiting data; it is an essential task in modern business management.Intelligence is data that is put into a context, conveying meaning or knowledge to a userwho will use that information to take action; information is actionable data. This includes most of the traditional ‘overheads’: administration; human resources;sales and marketing; and research and development. So what does this mean from thepoint-of-view of business process management?

Historically, intelligence has been the process for acquiring data and transforming it intoinformation by distillation.

However, for most managers, informationis seen as an inverted pyramid, with less information available at lowerclassification levels, and the pyramidwidth growing up the command echelons,showing the need to consider a widerrange of issues (see Figure 5).

The access to such an augmented sourceof information has lead to anomalieswithin information handling, such as datadeluge, causing information overload.There is a perception that users, at a givenlevel, need to have access to all the data available at the lower levels, becausethey would not trust the summarisationwhich would take place otherwise. Other anomalies also occur withinstratified security hierarchies; information

flows in a single direction from lowest to highest management domains with no controlover information repetition at successively higher levels.

The question we are asking is: “is it necessary to repeat the information filteringprocesses at each level to ensure sanity of information, or is it possible to provide directaccess by everyone to the intelligence that they require, in the form relevant to theirrole?” This is, in essence, the challenge and justification for a central intelligencemanagement facility, central meaning logically central (for example, through a metadatarepository) not necessarily physically central.

What are the Problems?

Business Intelligence is an integration problem. In simple terms, the problems are:

l Get the right information to the relevant person in the shortest possible time.

l Address the possible information overload.

l Camouflage the intention of the queries, especially when tapping into open sources.

l Ultimately, provide efficient and effective support of the decision-making process.

Sound management is based on having the right information to start with. Althoughtotal information is not practical, it is essential for management to have up-to-date andrelevant feedback from the operational people and systems, from customers, from themarket, and about the competition and regulation.

Business Intelligence is about the interaction between decision-makers and information and about the way people make decisions – at all levels – with theinformation available to them through technology. In essence, Business Intelligence isabout the ability to adapt and survive; it is an integral part of the Response Ability of anorganisation.

Information vs. Intelligence

The Role of BusinessIntelligence in the Ability

to Respond

MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

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The economics of information will be discussed in the next section of this ManagementGuide. But as Business Intelligence is now recognised as an important asset of anenterprise, the need to secure Business Intelligence systems, from internal and externalthreats, is moving higher on the agenda of executives. This Management Guide does notreview the technologies of Information security (Infosec) but there are specificconsiderations about the protection of confidentiality of information that are not alwaysunderstood outside the military domain. The following is a brief outline of some of thepossible measures that can be taken.

The application of the NTK principles to the IT infrastructure is not as thorough as itshould be. Outside the military domain, only the most security-conscious financialorganisations have taken the necessary measures. Credit Suisse is one organisation that

has reported the use of a trusted operatingsystem (a version of SUN MicrosystemsSolaris™ modified by Argus Systems, Inc.The architecture of such a secure system uses trusted operating systems.The implementation of secure NTKdomains on Intranets, with access to opensources or the Internet, requires anarchitecture similar to Figure 6. Each of the separate NTK domains should beindependently managed.

The NTK server will support, as aminimum, the following:

l One-way data diode (for the most secure systems).

l Anti-virus.

l Authentication of source (host machine or interface).

l Authentication of the originator IP.

l Optional decryption.

Nowadays, we know how to design better business processes, how to implement betterworkflow systems, and how to cope with document management. Networking all theseresources is now well established. The difficulty is how to best integrate these systemsinto a shared conceptual and technological framework. One of the important issuesfacing all organisations, public or private, is to build and maintain its staff’s capabilityto do their jobs well in the pursuit of a shared objective.

Mediating Between People: Supporting collaborative work.

Managing Processes Rather Than Functions: Process integration of locally managedprocesses rather than functional departments.

Exploiting the Emergence of Global Information Systems: Global resources, inside andoutside the enterprise, supporting people to solve local problems.

Managing the knowledge of a group of people requires the integration of the activitieswithin processes, the integration of the people within the group, and the integration ofpeople and IT systems. The cultural dimension is the invisible component of KnowledgeManagement is still not well understood.

The required solution should:

l Support operational security measures.

l Protect the intention and confidentiality of the intelligence requirement.

l Filter out irrelevant information.

l Allow a degree of fuzziness in the original query (‘shot gun query’).

l Enable rather than restrict the users.

Security

Management and Planning

NTK Architecture

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The economics of information is becoming better understood. In the New Economy,triggered by the emergence of e-business, the mastery of information processing andintelligence will be a significant competitive capability.

As a broad estimate, the cost of information includes general overheads: Research andDevelopment (R&D); administration; marketing; sales; and training. This is fairly easyto extract from management reports and gives an upper limit to the cost of informationthat is often deemed impossible to evaluate.

On cost alone, the effect of the New Economy way of doing business can be dramatic.A study of a large sample of 10,000 US corporations shows that significant savings ina value chain implemented using Business-to-Business (B2B) e-business, compared toa traditional one, results in a direct reduction of the cost of information. The sampleshowed a reduction from 34 per cent to 24 per cent of the cost component in the valuechain. However, traditional accounting practices offer no consistent method forincorporating a measure of information and its management in the bottom-line (see thework done by Paul Strassmann in formulating the metrics of Knowledge Capital™).

Information is a strategic asset that needs to be protected. Conversely, it is also aresource that can be played against competitors. The release or ease of theft ofmisleading information is not yet a well-practised technique in economical ‘cyberwar’.With the increased sophistication of the New Economy, we must expect a corresponding

mastery of this kind of intelligence warfare.counter intelligence is one weapon on thecommercial battlefield. We deliberately usemilitary terms here because the lessonsfrom defence are directly exploitable bycorporations. By adapting the definition of

military intelligence, we would define this form of competitive activity as follows(definition inspired from Kevin F. McCrohan, ‘Competitive Intelligence: Preparing for theInformation War, Long Range Planning, August 1998, Vol 31, pages 586-593):

“Actions taken to create an information differentiation in which we possess a superiorunderstanding of a potential competitor’s market, financial, technological and culturalstrength, vulnerability and alliances.”

“This is achieved through: a) the integrated use of competitive intelligence and security,competitive deception and psychological operations, in offensive and defensive modes;and b) the erection of defences against theft, disruption, distortion, or destruction ofinformation systems by competitors.”

The immediate focus of this kind of consideration is the threat from competitors.However, there is an emerging societal and political structure that could overshadow theimportance of ‘normal competitors’ and that is the growing importance of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). NGOs are small, initially disorganised, groups ofpeople with a common interest – economical or political – that feel that the traditionalconsumer or political channels do not represent adequately their point of view. The justification of the existence of NGOs is outside the scope of this ManagementGuide, but the relevance of their interest in the information held by a corporation is.

l Automatic routing to the appropriate NTK domain and filtering out of information not authorised for that domain.

l Labelling of information.

l Management of encryption keys within NTK domains.

l Registration of users, roles, NTK definitions, and membership.

The secure operating system is protected against hijacking of ‘super user’ privileges, andall the resources, including data storage devices and printers, are accessed on a strictauthorised basis. A technique known as ‘labelling’ is enforced by the operating systemwhereby every piece of data is stamped with an appropriate access key that allows onlyauthorised users to see or modify it.

Intelligence War and Counter-Intelligence

With the increased sophistication of the NewEconomy, we must expect a corresponding mastery of

this kind of intelligence warfare.

THE ECONOMICS OF INTELLIGENCE

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The industries that embrace the business models of the New Economy will be subjectto rapidly changing economics in the supply and distribution of their products. They willneed to structure their information systems to gain maximum advantage from

information and understand the rules forbuilding effective information strategies.

On-line auctions, or on-line reverseauctions (Invitations to Tender) areexamples of the shape of things to come.The transactions are so fast that it ispractically impossible to win without the

help of specialised software to integrate the various parameters of the deal. Tradetransactions over the Internet will look more and more like pure financial transactionsand the way the financial institutions operate may give us a clue on the future of riskmanagement. As information in the trade process increasingly becomes a negotiableentity, the understanding and mastery of futures, derivatives, and other Values at Risk(a financial concept) will be an essential skill in trading.

Increasing information productivity is a new concept in the portfolio of seniormanagement worries, but it will move to the top of the priorities when shareholdersrealise that the value of a company in the New Economy is largely dependant upon itsKnowledge capital, related to its stock market value.

The industries that embrace the business models ofthe New Economy will be subject to rapidly changing

economics in the supply and distribution of theirproducts.

Computer Associates


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eBusinesses are faced with ever increasing amounts of information, in a wide variety offormats, across a multitude of platforms and applications. Although there is a wealth ofdata, it is often difficult to turn this information into usable intelligence. It first needs tobe unlocked, shared, preserved, and integrated into the eBusiness processes.

Along with the growth of information, Internet technologies offer tremendous newopportunities which require organisations to develop new strategies, create effectivebusiness models, and interact with each other in different ways. To realise its potentialand support these emerging eBusiness models – such as Business-to-Business (B2B)and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) – an enterprise must successfully transform andintegrate applications, processes, and systems across the entire value chain.

Organisations need to turn information into knowledge to support eBusiness initiatives.They need solutions that:

l Manage information and transform it into an effective resource.

l Distribute the information to employees, partners, and customers.

l Use knowledge to predict eBusiness opportunities and increase ROI.

l Develop stronger customer relationships that increase satisfaction and build loyalty.

Managing eBusinessInformation

Computer AssociateseBusiness Intelligence

Solutions

eBUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

Jasmine® – CA’s portfolio of information management solutions – enables organisationsto cohesively manage vital business information and leverage it for new opportunities.It provides the most comprehensive family of software for managing the applicationdevelopment life cycle, integrating eBusiness applications, data and systems, andtransforming business processes to support new business initiatives.

The Jasmine portfolio includes eBusiness transformation and integration solutions,portal and knowledge management solutions, and predictive analysis and visualisationsolutions. Each meets a critical customer need:

l When customers transition to eBusiness, they must build new applications andintegrate them with existing systems, processes, and applications. CA helpscustomers develop, deploy, test, and maintain integrated applications and databaseswhile they complete their eBusiness transition.

Computer Associates Jasmine portfolio offers powerful integrated eBusiness intelligence solutions.

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l CA also helps companies be responsive and productive. CA’s portal and knowledgemanagement solutions limit time spent searching for, retrieving or consolidatinginformation. Viewers instead can see what they want to see, when they want to seeit in a customised format.

l CA’s advanced, patented intelligence technology helps businesses identify newopportunities. Using CA’s technology, businesses can analyse buying patterns,identify cross-selling opportunities and differentiate themselves from theircompetition by knowing their customers better.

Knowledge Management

Personalised and Focused Viewof Information

Delivering Unique SolutionsWith Predictive Analysis

Technology

Leveraging Intelligence forCustomer Satisfaction

Jasmine Knowledge Management solutions enable an enterprise to understand, change,manage, and leverage its information resources for a competitive advantage. Thesesolutions are metadata-driven, allowing an organisation to identify and maximiseinformation assets across solutions, ensuring consistency and reuse. From automatingthe design of an optimal data warehouse and guaranteeing easy access to a broad rangeof information resources; to powerful web-based query, analysis and reporting; andcutting-edge portal technology – CA provides a complete, integrated KnowledgeManagement solution.

Jasmine Portal is a secure, scalable, advanced Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) thatprovides a personalised, consolidated view of information, applications, and Web-enabled content. It has a completely open architecture that enables an organisation tocreate, deliver, and consume all forms of Web content – from static pages to dynamic,interactive applications.

Jasmine Portal integrates multiple information sources and applications – such asdocuments, e-mail, reporting and analysis tools, and the Web – thereby providingaccess to meaningful content from one eBusiness Workplace. It allows users to createone or more personalised views such as Marketing, Sales, or Procurement, and obtaincustomised information relevant to their varied roles and activities with a single logon.Through discussion forums, it enables business partners and co-workers to shareinformation in real-time allowing concurrent dialogs about any aspect of their businessprocesses. Jasmine Portal allows companies to interact seamlessly around the worldwith localised access in many languages.

By leveraging CA’s advanced, US patented Neugents predictive analysis technology andproven rules and inference engines, organisations can deploy unique, intelligentsolutions. These powerful eBusiness applications enable an enterprise to predict end-user needs, suggest new selling opportunities, and dynamically customise the userinterface to achieve greater intimacy with customers, partners, and suppliers.

CA’s predictive analysis solutions enable organisations to quickly develop and extendapplications with intelligent components that can be reused and shared by multiplebusiness functions or processes. For example, an insurance company can build aknowledge base to suggest the policy most likely to be accepted by a customer. Thesame knowledge base can be used by a predictive model to empower the salesdepartment to cross-sell or up-sell other products or services to the same customers.

Visualisation adds a new dimension to decision-making by improving the productivity ofknowledge workers and their ability to realise value in data marts, data warehouses, andeCommerce functions. By condensing business information into an intuitive, easy-to-understand reality, data visualisation quickly and effectively turns volumes of data intouseful knowledge. The results can be used to increase ROI and drive cost efficiencies.

Jasmine provides comprehensive and intelligent CRM solutions that help companiesmeet strategic eBusiness challenges, including increasing sales through effective targetedmarketing, improving customer service at every contact point, and understanding andpredicting customer needs. CA’s CRM solutions leverage customer data across the entireenterprise, providing all channels with a complete view of each customer.

These CRM solutions have the unique ability to integrate operational and analyticaldata, provide comprehensive wireless-enabled sales and marketing automation, initiatereal-time responses, and intelligently predict customer preferences. This leading CRMsolution suite offers best-in-class functionality, personalised customer service, andcomprehensive self-service capabilities. In addition, dynamic portal technology engagescustomers in an interactive, personalised exchange, providing an efficient and effectiveone-to-one on-line experience.

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Jasmine enables you to attain eBusiness success by managing, analysing, and sharingyour information assets to identify new opportunities and maximise revenue potential.Its proven application life cycle solutions and robust integration capabilities enable yourorganisation to improve the entire application development process, successfullyintegrate new technologies with existing systems, and deliver the high performanceeBusiness applications you need to connect your customers, partners, and employees.

Jasmine allows you to deploy a personalised information environment that greatlyimproves communications within your organisation and between employees, customers,and suppliers. This scalable, enterprise solution, combined with unique predictiveanalysis and visualisation, enables your organisation to present compelling real-timeinformation that enhances customer satisfaction.

Jasmine: eBusiness Intelligenceat its Best

CONTACT DETAILS

World HeadquartersComputer Associates International, Inc. One Computer Associates Plaza Islandia, NY 11749 USA

Tel: +1 631 342 6000 Fax: +1 631 342 6800 Sales: +1 800 225 5224

European HeadquartersComputer Associates plc Ditton Park Riding Court Road Datchet, Slough Berkshire SL3 9LL

Tel: +44 (0)1753 577733 Fax: +44 (0)1753 825464

Sales: [email protected]

www.cai.com

Hyperwave Ltd.


www.hyperwave.com

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There can be little doubt that one of the greatest challenges facing organisations todayrelates to increasing efficiency with which information and knowledge can be shared, bothwithin their infrastructure and increasingly across extended supply chains. Organisationsare at their most effective and proficient when the right information flows to the right pointin the business at the right time, with an ease and embedded intelligence that facilitatesaccurate and influential decisions. Hyperwave has developed its extremely functionaland thorough eKnowledge Infrastructure to help organisations utilise the value of theirshared information resources, from collection and storage through to delivery and action.

Hyperwave provides collaborative knowledge management systems to organisations sothat they can create and access information anywhere in the extended enterprise anddeliver it to employees, customers, and partners. Unlike point solutions, the HyperwaveeKnowledge Infrastructure is a broad, integrated product suite of applications, includingcontent and document management, search and retrieval, workflow, collaboration, ande-learning. It also includes a portal product, which gives a single, personalised point ofaccess to all information, integration with other systems, and enables collaboration onprojects The applications can be implemented as individual or multiple solutions.Moreover, Hyperwave products are unique in that they are highly cost-effective andscalable solutions with a proven customer track record.

HYPERWAVE eKNOWLEDGE INFRASTRUCTURE

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The Hyperwave eKnowledge Infrastructure consists of three principle products: theeKnowledge Suite (eKS) a suite of applications including document management andcontent management for the organisation of all dispersed information; the eKnowledgePortal (eKP) for a single point of personalised access and collaboration to corporateinformation; and the eLearning Suite (eLS) for flexible and interactive on-line learningthat uses the corporate knowledge as its base. The heart of these products is IS/6 that represents the core technology of Hyperwave’s eKnowledge Infrastructure and the platform for the applications built on it, which enables companies to effectivelystructure and share information internally, and with their customers and externalpartners – with minimal need of administrative support. The eKnowledge Infrastructureis an open architecture enabling connection to external databases and othertechnologies.

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One of the particular strengths of the Hyperwave eKnowledge Infrastructure is that itencourages users to publish content, by making the process intuitive and quick. One ofthe most powerful ways for users to publish new content is to use virtual folders. This gives the user a windows explorer-based folder view on objects within the system.As with windows explorer, virtual folders support drag-and-drop, modifications, such asa change of attributes and version control functions, such as check in, check out, anddelete version can be applied at folder level.

One of the significant attributes of the eKnowledge Infrastructure is its Link Managementfunctionality. Within a Web environment, users navigate through a structure by followinghyperlinks. In the context of KM, these hyperlinks will relate to a vast range of documentsand content. Maintaining integrity of such links is a complex and cost intensive task, ifdeadlinks are to be avoided. As a result, this aspect can seriously curtail theeffectiveness of a Web-based KM solution. Hyperwave maintains all links dynamicallyand automatically as an out-of-the-box function. Very simply, this is achieved by storingevery piece of data and content as a series of objects with associated attributes. Object attributes are assigned by administrators or the publisher of a given piece ofinformation. Therefore, as an object is moved, updated, or deleted within the Hyperwaveinfrastructure, all the related links are also updated. Content cannot be lost and linkscannot be broken.

This link management functionality is central to the overall strength and robustness of aHyperwave solution. It ensures that any bit of data or content can be tracked, indexed, andretrieved throughout its lifetime, what is more, the organisation does not need to dedicateresources to ensure this kind of integrity as it is managed by the Hyperwave system.

Hyperwave has always supported strong collaborative features made available throughopen, standard Internet technology. Leveraging the collaborative Team Work Space ofour eKnowledge Suite, the Hyperwave eKnowledge Portal introduces TeamTabs.TeamTabs represent a role-based portal tab that consolidates all of the necessaryinformation sources and applications relevant to a given project. For example, a TeamTabcan surface relevant discussions, documents, group calendars, and task lists, in additionto other objects pertaining to a given project. Consolidating all of this importantinformation into a single location eliminates the need for team members and managersto access multiple sources to work or attain a snapshot of the status of a given project.This consolidation saves a tremendous amount of time and translates into significantcost savings.

In an increasingly complex and competitive business environment, organisations arelooking for process improvement and innovation fostered through greater collaboration.Nowhere else is this more apparent than in organisations that adopt the principles ofknowledge management. In fact, research shows that for organisations that effectivelyleverage their intellectual assets and capital, net profit is close to 30% higher than theirpeers who do not take an active approach to managing these important assets.

Virtual Folders

Link Management

The Power of us

Collaboration

The limitations of traditional classroom-based training are all too apparent. There is thehigh cost of bringing participants into the classroom and away from their work and the difficulty of resourcing such training. In addition, it is crucial to be able measure theimpact of training upon organisational success, an aspect that is particularly poorlyaddressed via conventional approaches. Traditional training is also supply-oriented,geared towards scheduled events rather than offering demand access to information.

Hyperwave’s eLearning Suite addresses such limitations through its Assured InformationDelivery (AID) methodology. AID depicts the following sequence: First, Assessment. This is pre-qualification of an attendee via a skill profile or through a questionnaire. This information is then used in the second stage, Consumption, to ensure that onlyrelevant content is delivered. Thus, each student receives a personalised view coursecontent, which is targeted for maximum benefit. The third step is the Practising ofacquired skills and/or knowledge, leading to the next step of testing Comprehension. The last two steps are the Creation of new content, and Feedback for continuousimprovement of skills and course material. As part of the eKnowledge Infrastructure, theeLearning Suite can leverage the range of enterprise data, information, and capturedknowledge. It has been developed around the established principles of Professor Maurer,a renowned champion of Web-Based Training (WBT).

eLearning Suite

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The eLearning Suite has been designed as a virtual training centre. There is a Foyer forregistration and general course information, a study room for course enrolment,discussion, and performance statistics, course rooms for the structured course material,a Café for meeting with other people for general discussion and interaction, and anAdministration room for control of the training environment.

Established content and new material can easily be incorporated into the system (for example, using Virtual Folders). Users can communicate and collaborate withcolleagues but, more importantly, with human tutors. Thus, eLearning Suite combinesthe best of classical classroom training (personal attention, community, comprehensiontesting) with the best of computer-aided training (rich content, anytime, anywhere)without any of the disadvantages.

Hyperwave has strong academic roots; original development of the technology began in1989 at the Graz University of Technology. Even now, the institution acts as a source oftechnical expertise for Hyperwave’s development team. This means that Hyperwavesolutions have a foundation of thorough and robust technology, which have beencarefully developed devoid of the commercial pressures that sees many solutions beingrushed into the market. The series of products that constitute the HyperwaveeKnowledge Infrastructure have been developed in tandem explicitly for Webenvironments.

Hyperwave has grown through investment and technical development and now employsapproximately 180 people. It is headquartered in Munich, Germany, and also has salesoffices in the UK, France, Switzerland, and the USA. The company is currently privatelyheld, with demonstrable revenue growth; from 2.5 million (Euros) in 1998, to 5.7million in 1999, and 13.0 million in 2000. Figures for 2001 are projected to show asignificant increase on this impressive growth rate.

Hyperwave has attracted over 150 large-enterprise customers from many verticalmarkets, including high-technology, Government, education, new media, andmanufacturing. These include: BMW AG; DaimlerChrysler; Deutsche Telekom; UniversalMusic; McCann Erickson; Siemens AG; Panasonic; Deutsche Bank; Metlife Insurance;United States Department of Defense; European Commission; European Space Agency;and the University of Glasgow.

VENDOR PROFILE

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CONTACT DETAILS

Hyperwave Ltd.Centurion HouseLondon RoadStainesMiddlesexTW18 4AXUK

Tel: +44 (0)1784 410154Fax:+44 (0)1784 410310

E-mail: [email protected]

Contact Name: Terry Jordan

www.hyperwave.com

Information Builders UK Ltd.


www.informationbuilders.co.uk

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Information Builders’ Business Intelligence Solution is WebFOCUS. WebFOCUS hasbeen designed to support today’s most critical e-business initiatives deliveringinformation easily and instantly to management, employees, customers, partners, andvendors – at the point of business to those individuals on the ‘front line’ whose decisionshave immediate impact.

WebFOCUS lets you build self-service, production reporting and business analysissystems that grow your business by getting people the information they need ondemand.

Its strengths and key differentiators are clearly visible: the ability to use any Webbrowser makes it easy to deploy WebFOCUS across a distributed large user population(without necessitating that software be installed at the PC layer).

WebFOCUS has a number of features that makes it attractive to non-tecnhical users –these include zero click reporting, whereby information is pushed to individuals with noeffort on their part or reports can be burst to recipients so they only get the parts of thereport that are relevant to them. WebFOCUS also offers tight integration with Microsoftproducts. Its Reporting Server can generate highly formatted Excel and Excel 2000spreadsheets and XML is used to dynamically generate Excel pivot tables from any dataaccessible to WebFOCUS.

Information Builders is one of the largest privately owned software companiesspecialising in the supply of Web Business Intelligence and Enterprise Integration. Its enterprise solutions enable the timely delivery of information to customers,employees, and partners across the globe.

Information Builders has over twenty-five years of experience and is the leading providerof solutions in helping businesses improve their mission-critical operations, simplyenabling individuals to make better decisions. These solutions are supported by aninfrastructure of support services and strategic collaborative partnerships.

The two core competencies that have underpinned Information Builders’ offerings overthe last twenty-five years are the integration of data from core business systems and themanipulation of that data into information to help the business grow. With the adventof e-business, that same Information Builders’ technology is integrating applicationsboth within and between enterprises.

With the firm belief that “you shouldn’t have to work too hard for the information youneed,” Information Builders recommends that an organisation empowers all areas of thebusiness simply and swiftly. This involves utilising the investment in the businesssystems currently in use, fronted only with a browser and taking full advantage of theemergence of the Internet.

Moreover, real competitive advantage lies in the empowerment of those individuals who are at the front line of any business – those responsible for the day-to-day decision-making. Information Builders questions the notion that ‘information’ is primarily for the business elite, or the ‘power user’. To ignore the rank and file – who constitute thelargest group of information users – is tantamount to creating an information underclass.With this in mind, Information Builders offers a truly strategic approach to informationdelivery.

WebFOCUS BusinessIntelligence Solution, “From

Data to Decision”

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

THE COMPANY

INFORMATION BUILDERS’ VISION

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Information Builders has found that in a typical e-business project, the enterpriseintegration element is well over 65% of the total cost – it remains the key challenge andis a complex task. The key to long-term success is an infrastructure that can quickly and easily accommodate changes in business processes and technology. Creating suchan infrastructure demands the integration of diverse technologies, applications, andbusiness semantics.

Putting the right e-business infrastructure in place is vitally important from the inceptionof the project. IT Managers have the unenviable task of spending time building a solidfoundation whilst being pressurised by the business for rapid deployment of revenueearning solutions. The IT Manager who wants a successful e-business project would bewell advised to resist the pressure and get the building blocks in place first. Time andtime again, Information Builders has seen this pay off in the long-term.

To address the integration challenges of the Enterprise, Information Builders has createda separate organisation ‘iWay Software’. ‘iWay’ is an integration superhighway for e-business. It’s a vision of a virtual enterprise equipped with e-business-to-Enterprise(e2E) integration technologies for meeting any type of business challenge. InformationBuilders’ vision translates directly into radical reductions in the time, cost, and effortrequired to take e-business integration projects “the last mile” – connecting messagingand application hosting platforms to back-office systems.

The iWay Service Channel Architecture makes this vision a reality with a universalinfrastructure for e-business. The Service Channel Architecture is completely modular,consisting of more than 120 adapters and connectors. These iWay components can beconfigured together as required to accommodate virtually all types of enterprise IT assetsand application types within iWay’s logical and physical infrastructure. This is howiWay’s flexible infrastructure enables new e-business systems as extensions of existingapplications, transaction systems, legacy and relational data, ERP and CRM packages,and (Enterprise Application Integration) EAI tools. iWay also simplifies adding,modifying, changing out, reusing, removing, and maintaining all these back-endresources, as necessary, to work with new EAI platforms, Business-to-Business (B2B)solutions, mobile and wireless technologies, and the Web.

With WebFOCUS, Information Builders is able to provide a complete one-stop shopsolution for customers looking for an end-to-end Business Intelligence solution. The solutioncomprises the following components:

l WebFOCUS Application Server – The foundation of the WebFOCUS suite of products. It provides a development environment and processing engine that pulls data from all corporate databases, transforms it into intelligent information and delivers the results to a browser, mobile device, or other client tool.

l WebFOCUS ETL – Simplifies the process of extracting data from operational systems. WebFOCUS ETL is the most complete extraction, transformation, and load tool available for building data marts, data warehouses, and operational data stores.

l WebFOCUS Report Caster – A Java-based scheduling and distribution application, which centralises the execution and distribution of reports over the Web, e-mail, printers, faxes and via SMS. Reports are generated in a wide range of formats including HTML, EXCEL, PDF, word processing and Excel 2000. WebFOCUS Report Caster triggers reports using event driven scenarios (i.e. when new data becomes available), or alerts which distribute reports only when specific conditions are met.

l Enterprise Information Portal – Combines a diversity of Web content through a single access point by relying on technologies that users are comfortable with: browsers and search capabilities. Information Builders’ Enterprise Information Portal provides business managers with a snapshot of their organisations at any given time via the use of Key Performance Indicators.

iWay, Enterprise IntegrationSolution – “From Data to

Decision”

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

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BT International Private Circuits provides dedicated international data links to itscustomers. To monitor the performance of their private circuits on a daily basis BTInternational chose Information Builders Business Intelligence solution, WebFOCUS.WebFOCUS provides timely reports in order to expedite repairs to the private circuitsand develop a rebate system to handle effective and rapid client refunds.

“The project has more than paid for itself, we have achieved savings of around £1million over the last two years, through better staff deployment, improved efficiency,reduced overheads, and reduced support costs.” Adolf Mergulhao, Senior BusinessAnalyst.

Ford Racing supports rally teams competing across Europe by supplying over 5,000individual car parts as and when needed. Using Information Builders’ BusinessIntelligence technology (WebFOCUS), a Web-enabled stock control and maintenancesystem (StockMAN) was developed that ensured increased business efficiencythroughout their purchase, supply, and invoice process and led to aggressive businessgrowth.

“StockMAN is now the lynchpin of our business, it has liberated our business and hada remarkable effect on how we think – the business is full of fresh ideas and peopleare able to innovate. From a practical point of view we are exceeding some challengingprofit targets.” Gavin Roberts, Sales and Marketing Supervisor.

The common theme that runs through all Information Builders’ customers is that theyhave chosen our solutions because, ultimately, it enables them to make better decisions.These maybe better decisions at board-level or the daily decisions taken by the ‘rank and file’.

Information Builders focuses on the IT Top 500 enterprise companies in the UK such asBarclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ford, BT International, UBS Warburg, BTCellnet,Corus, and Microsoft. It also has a specific focus on vertical sectors including banking,telecommunications, finance, local government, and utilities.

To provide customers with the best, most comprehensive technology solutions,Information Builders has established development and marketing alliances with some ofthe world’s leading hardware, software, database, networking, and application softwarevendors.

Strategic business collaborations have been established with many key vendors,including Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, AvantGo, RIM, EDS, TelesensKSCL,and Novell. Working as a supplier to Microsoft, Information Builders has been verysuccessful in helping Microsoft users access and integrate data and make that datainstantly available to decision-makers over the Web. Similarly, the partnerships withAvantGo and RIM (Blackberry) have proved instrumental in extending the capabilities ofBusiness Intelligence solutions to the mobile workforce.

Hundreds of companies worldwide already use iWay Software tools and technologies forenterprise integration. That’s because our products are based on award-winning EDAenterprise middleware technology. There is simply no-more robust or comprehensivesolution available today to integrate existing data, applications, transactions, and otherEAI resources for new e-business ventures.

BT International

Ford Racing

CUSTOMERS – “MAKING BETTER DECISIONS”

MARKET FOCUS AND PARTNERSHIPS

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For more information on how Information Builders’ solutions can help your organisationvisit us at www.informationbuilders.co.uk

Corus Packaging Plus is a supplier of light gauge steel for packaging and non-packagingapplications. Steel making is a complex process that generates large amounts of data.Packaging Plus process engineers wanted to collate and analyse data from numerouslegacy systems in order to improve process control and speed up new productdevelopment.

Using Information Builders reporting, data warehousing and iWay enterprise integrationtechnology, Corus now has a management information infrastructure that is providingnumerous benefits: process control has improved tools that are leading to increasedquality; commercial relationships are being improved and more accurate costings areavailable for financial purposes.

“With the technology from Information Builders we are able to understand processesbetter – we are gaining better control of the levers in the manufacturing process. The ability to integrate data from customers is also assisting our customer relationshipmanagement. We have a much more scientific approach to new product development– the system allows us not just to number-crunch but to really validate new ideas!”John Albiston, Project Manager, Business Intelligence.

Part of the Thomson Travel Group, Thomson Holidays is the UK leader in the inclusivetour business. Thomson’s challenge was to provide an efficient management reportingand control tool for a new Call Centre facility combining call data and holiday bookinginformation. WebFOCUS, Information Builders’ Business Intelligence solution, wasdeployed quickly and easily. This provided Thomson with a corporate Intranet enablingaccess to on-line reports and effective management of employee incentive schemes.

“The Call Centre Management now has access to timely information about business-critical processes and sales trends together with the information required to monitorand assess performance at a variety of levels.” Melanie Kern, Development Co-ordinator.

UBS Warburg is a leading global financial services organisation. UBS had a requirementto access company data held on a number of disparate applications and on variousplatforms. Information Builders helped to provide a Web-based enterprise-reportingenvironment, enabling UBS Investment Managers to make timely decisions regarding theperformance of their portfolios. WebFOCUS was deployed directly on their mainframe,enabling scalability and an opportunity to rationalise other applications, plus theperformance advantages of residing as close as possible to the DB2 data source.

“Information Builders offered the only viable solution for UBS in the OS390 marketplace.” Andy Carter, Sales Account Manager, Information Builders UK Ltd.

Corus

Thomson Holidays

UBS Warburg

Information Builders UK Ltd.Wembley PointHarrow RoadWembleyMiddlesexHA9 6DE

Tel: +44 (0)208 982 4700Fax: +44 (0)208 903 2191


Contact Name: Donna Land

No. of Employees: 60

Turnover: £10 million per annum

www.informationbuilders.co.uk

CONTACT DETAILS

MicroStrategy


www.microstrategy.com

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The Bank of Montreal needed a Web-based business intelligence solution to accessbusiness performance management information and present it to a broad base of users,with different requirements, via an easy-to-use interface.

THE BANK OF MONTREAL MINDS ITS BUSINESS MICROSTRATEGY-STYLE

Challenge

Solution

Benefits

MicroStrategy’s business intelligence platform is the Bank of Montreal’s corporatestandard for business intelligence, anchoring Management Information – New Directions(MIND). The powerful business intelligence application runs against a 2-terabyte IBMDB2 Universal Database containing customer account and transaction data.

The Bank of Montreal expects to realise significant benefits annually through the abilityto provide both distribution channels and the product management team with access toinformation on customers and products.

MIND helps more than 1,000 bank employees manage channels of distribution,manage and track product profitability, and market effectively to its customers, therebyincreasing the profitability ratio of its over 5 million households.

MIND users are keeping tabs on risk and profitability, minimising attrition, performingone-to-one marketing, and strengthening customer relationships.

Responding to increasing competition infinancial services, banks are employingbusiness intelligence solutions to providefront-line and product management staffwith the tools to better understand theircustomers’ needs, understand the underlyingdrivers of profitability, and reduce customerattrition.

One financial services institution, the Bank of Montreal, has enabled its employees toaccess detailed and extensive information about its customer accounts, and manage riskmore effectively. As one of the largest banks in North America, with more than $238billion in assets and approximately 32,000 employees, the Bank of Montreal realisedthat a comprehensive business intelligence strategy on top of its massive IBM DB2 datawarehouse was critical to growing future business. Led by Kathy Lisson, Executive VicePresident, Global Information Technology, the bank undertook a major project to definethe specific management information needs of its employees and develop a solution todeliver the required information in a timely and effective deployment.

To meet these needs, the Bank of Montreal’s development team, led by Ted Mendes,Department Manager of Data Warehousing, and his senior management team,consisting of Dr. Jan Mrazek, Senior Manager of the Business Intelligence SolutionsGroup, and Doug Welch, Senior Manager of the Business Intelligence DevelopmentGroup, chose MicroStrategy to anchor the Management Information Group’s majordevelopment project: Management Information – New Directions (MIND). MIND is aMicroStrategy-based business intelligence application that enables users to ask a broadrange of simple to sophisticated queries against a single data mart that is updated withmonthly information from a variety of data sources.

Since its selection in 1997, MicroStrategy has become the most deployed businessintelligence software at the Bank of Montreal, said Mrazek. “At the Bank of Montreal, weview MicroStrategy as a comprehensive platform that enables rapid access to large volumesof structured information and satisfies the most complex business queries,” said Welch.

MicroStrategy’s platform enables approximately 500 queries to run against the databaseeach day and then delivers intuitive, drillable reports to senior executives, financial servicemanagers, line-of-business managers, branch employees, and human resource personnel.

Users of MIND are able to cull data down to the single household level and can askcomplex questions of the data. “You can follow trends and make projections about agiven customer segment,” said Mrazek. “For instance, we can determine profitability forcustomers who use a particular mix of our products.”

MicroStrategy platform anchors award-winning MINDsystem that helps employees uncover ways to retain

and strengthen relationships with more than 5 millionhouseholds.

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MIND users are also able to perform customer relationship management analyses tohighlight accounts with low performance rates. With a few clicks of a mouse, users canidentify accounts with diminishing activity and generate a list of customers that arelikely to take their business elsewhere. Bank employees can then take action to retainthese accounts by calling the customer and offering better-performing investments. “The MicroStrategy-based system discovers opportunities for us to cross-sell andperform one-to-one marketing that would have been impossible for us to do in theprevious environment,” said Mrazek.

In addition to some out-of-the-box MicroStrategy implementations, the Bank customisedthe MicroStrategy interface to meet the needs of two specific user groups. “The point ofsale interface is a dynamic interface that gives six key metrics to financial servicesmanagers and sales team leaders in a highly intuitive format,” said Bank of MontrealManaging Director Michele McCormac. “MicroStrategy enables these users to accesstheir customer portfolios and easily understand the information while leveraging thepower of the technology.”

The bank also supplies its executives with a risk dashboard interface that uses colourcoding based on credit risk, market risk, and operational risk conditions. “Across thesemajor risk areas are a series of actual metrics, such as weighted average risk rating orrisk weighted assets, that determine whether the thresholds will turn the icons on thedashboard green, yellow, or red,” said McCormac. “The dashboard allows users to drill-down and look at attachments that provide an explanation of the variances, prescribe acall to action, or detail an item that tells the user something needs to change,” she said.

The Bank of Montreal’s development teamsaid it chose MicroStrategy’s platform toanchor MIND because the Bank identifiedearly on that relational on-line analyticalprocessing was the most flexible and robustapproach for thousands of users to analysemassive amounts of data. The bank said it recognised the sophistication ofMicroStrategy’s query engine and its abilityto generate multi-pass Structured QueryLanguage (SQL). It also credits MIND’ssuccess to deploying MicroStrategy acrossthe bank and consolidating all of its data ina fast-performing IBM DB2 UniversalDatabase environment.

“I think it’s very important to view MicroStrategy not simply as a plug-in query tool, butas a business concept for organising and presenting information, as well as a platformthat supports our ever-expanding business intelligence and business performancemanagement initiatives,” said Welch. “We promote the MicroStrategy concept andplatform from the database design to the front-end design to the building of the reportsso that our users are able to take full advantage of its capabilities.”

The system validates value-based management, a concept embraced by the bank,which supports the use of quantitative analysis to determine the most effective way toallocate capital – monetary, human, or risk – in order to maximise shareholder value.

To ensure comfort with the system, McCormac and the Management Information Groupcontinue to listen to user requirements and respond with the appropriate functionality.“Since MicroStrategy’s technology is so easy to use, we devote less time on how to pointand click and more time helping people look at their business areas,” said McCormac.“We’re definitely on the right path because many of our users pass on news that theyused MIND to make better pricing decisions when negotiating mortgages or investmentrates, and have been able to use the information to focus on portfolio opportunities tostrengthen relationships with our current customers.”

“Our user success stories are quite amazing,” Mrazek concluded. “People who are usingMIND and MicroStrategy’s technology are making a difference in their business areasand are adding value to the bottom line.”

The Bank of Montreal won the 2000 RealWare Award for Best Data Warehouse and was recently the Data Warehousing winner in the ADT 2000 Innovator Awards. Both MicroStrategy and IBM provided the technology solution that resulted in thewinning entries.

“I think it’s very important to view MicroStrategy notsimply as a plug-in query tool, but as a business

concept for organising and presenting information aswell as a platform that supports our ever-expanding

business intelligence and business performancemanagement initiatives.”

Doug Welch, Senior ManagerBusiness Intelligence Solutions Group

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Microstrategy LimitedSt. Martins Place51 Bath RoadSloughBerksSL1 3UF

Tel: +44 (0)1753 826100Fax:+44 (0)1753 82 192


Contact Name: Bob Skeens, UK Country Manager

www.microstrategy.com

CONTACT DETAILS

NCorp


www.ncorp.com

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INTRODUCTION

THE IJEN TECHNOLOGY

IJEN INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION

Human beings possess a remarkable ability to find all sorts of patterns in complex setsof information. We can spot when a particular set of information matches a knownpattern and, equally importantly, we can spot when it doesn’t. Why this was soimportant during our evolution is open to debate, but what is undeniable is that thisability is extremely useful in the business world and is used in a multitude of areas.

For example, trades in the investment banking world are essentially agreements betweentwo parties. Reconciliation of the agreements can be automated, but it is still commonto employ roomfuls of trained clerks who do nothing except examine the 10 to 15% of exceptional cases that don’t match exactly. In the oil and gas industry,drilling engineers constantly monitor various parameters during drilling in order to watchfor signs of well collapse. Frauds, in the credit card and telecoms markets, are detectablebecause the pattern of usage is often subtly, yet significantly, different from normal.

Many of these areas of human expertise are now being replaced by NCorp’s Ijentechnology – not because people can’t do the work, but because Ijen can do it betterand more cost-effectively.

At the heart of all NCorp’s products is the powerful and proprietary Ijen pattern-recognition technology, which enables computers, for the first time, to replicate the abilityof humans to handle complex structured data1 in an intelligent and intuitive manner.

The Ijen technology enables the automation of complex business processes that havepreviously relied on extensive manual intervention. This encompasses a wide range oftasks from simply finding the most relevant information in a database, through to beingable to intelligently and automatically identify interesting or anomalous data, classifydata into appropriate categories and so on.

Ijen achieves this through a sophisticated mathematical understanding of: (i) thecontextual patterns within the database content; and (ii) the requirements of the personusing the data. By applying powerful pattern-matching algorithms, Ijen enables thedatabase to always return the information that best matches the requirements of the user.

By exploiting advanced pattern-recognition and analysis techniques, Ijen removes the needfor complex rule-based systems. Such systems suffer from a number of significantlimitations, including: (i) workable rule sets for real-world applications are almost impossiblycomplex to write; (ii) since they have to be written manually, they are time-consuming andexpensive to both create and maintain; and (iii) they are, in most cases, entirely application-specific. For a detailed explanation of both the Ijen technology and the weaknesses oftraditional approaches, please contact NCorp for a copy of the Ijen Technology White Paper.

As outlined below, NCorp has developed two product suites based on the Ijentechnology, Ijen Intelligent Automation and Ijen Customer Interaction:

The Intelligent Automation suite consists of a number of applications that are concernedwith analysing data or automating back-office (i.e. non-customer-facing) processes. Asdescribed below, these applications include the core matching technology, together withclassification and anomaly detection modules.

The Ijen Classifier is able to automatically, intelligently and reliably classify items into pre-defined categories even where the available data is incomplete or in some other way ‘dirty’.

Ijen Classifier

1. Structured data (whether in a relational database, an XML string or any other form) is an enterprise’s mostvaluable information asset since considerable time and expense will typically have been spent acquiring it,cleansing it and adding context to it.

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The Classifier is trained simply by showing it examples of correctly categorised items.After this training period, the Classifier can assign new, previously unseen samples tothe most probable classification, generalising from the previous examples with which ithas been trained. As new classes develop, or the system’s behaviour changes, the IjenClassifier can continually improve its behaviour through feedback of new examples.

As the case study below illustrates, the Ijen Classifier has myriad applications since thecategories into which data is classified can be complex and closely aligned to anorganisation’s key operational requirements:

Deep oil wells often drill through strata of different load bearing characteristics – some ofwhich may require a casing to be inserted into the well to prevent collapse. Inserting acasing makes the well secure, but is an expensive process; on the other hand, the collapse of the well is a punitively expensive event. So there is often a fine balance tobe struck between security and expense. In the past, this balance has been struck by anoften-overworked drilling engineer who has to use his experience to balance a multitudeof factors about drill bit type, speed, torque, temperature, and geological conditions.

The Ijen Classifier is being employed by one of the world’s largest oil companies toperform this work faster and more efficiently. Vast volumes of data are collectedwhenever a well is sunk, with or without costly hitches. Using this historicalinformation, the Ijen Classifier has been trained to identify combinations of parametervalues that have, in the past, preceded a collapse. When Ijen is fed data from a livedrilling session and when a potentially disastrous combination of values is neared,drilling can be stopped and the casing inserted.

The Ijen Anomaly Detector learns from previous examples to identify what is ‘normal’within a particular set of information. Using this training, the Anomaly Detector is ableto identify data that may be erroneous or otherwise significant to a business. Forexample, by monitoring transactions sent to an order management system, the AnomalyDetector could automatically detect unusual events, from incorrect data entries andpotential fraud, to long term changes in customer behaviour and market conditions.

The Ijen Anomaly Detector and Ijen Classifier form a powerful combination oftechnologies for analysing large flows of information, with the Classifier assigninginformation to the correct category based on previous experience, and the AnomalyDetector alerting the business to new and potentially interesting modes of behaviour thathave not previously been encountered.

The Customer Interaction suite consists of a number of applications that enablebusinesses to understand and serve their customers better. Historically, humanintermediaries acted as the interface between the end customer and the productdatabase, but the desire to offer 24x7 self-service and to cut costs has driven an agendaof disintermediation. Too often, however, the drive to cut costs has not only reducedstaff, but also eliminated the intuitive skills they use to create incremental sales.

At the simplest level, Ijen provides the customer with a highly intuitive method fornavigating the database. More importantly, as the customer interacts with the database,Ijen is able to implicitly profile that customer’s individual preferences – enabling trueone-to-one personalisation, and providing highly-effective business intelligence forcross-selling, up-selling, and so on.

Enables your customers or employees to quickly, easily, and intuitively search through amass of data to find the information that best matches their needs. Navigation is easyin practice – the user simply selects items that appeal and asks for more of the same.As this iterative process continues, the selections themselves are used to refine the search, so the information that is returned comes closer and closer to the user’sideal requirement.

Case Study – Predicting Oil WellCollapses

Ijen Anomaly Detector

Ijen Navigation

IJEN CUSTOMER INTERACTION

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As users navigate towards the information they want, the Ijen Profiler is able to ‘watch’and implicitly build a profile of each user’s needs and preferences. Profiles can be usedto target individual users with content that is truly personalised to their needs – on aone-to-one basis.

A major investment bank wished to better understand the behaviour and buying patternsof its institutional customers in order to better service their accounts. Individualsalespeople had expert understanding of their own specific customers relationships, butwith each salesperson having relationships with multiple clients, and each clienttypically dealing with several salespeople, understanding the big picture was asignificant challenge.

The powerful pattern-recognition technology embedded in the Ijen Profiler enabled thebank to automatically track and understand the buying patterns of these customers inreal-time based on transaction-level data. As customer positions changed with time, andthey moved in and out of different markets and sectors, the Ijen technology continuedto understand their ongoing needs. This understanding allowed any salesperson withinthe bank to automatically find likely buyers and sellers of particular stocks, greatlyincreasing their chance of generating commission for the bank. By analysing the detailsof these client profiles, salespeople could understand how each client was behaving,what and where they were likely to trade, and in what volume.

Enables users to explicitly create intelligent agents that continually look out forinformation that matches their requirements. Agents provide users with ongoing accessto relevant information without the need for constant effort and attention.

Proactively provides users with relevant information by alerting them via e-mail, SMS,or any other communications channel. The Ijen Alerter evaluates each user’s profilesand agents to identify information that is likely to be of interest to them.

NCorp was founded in February 2000 to commercialise technologies developed byCambridge University researchers at Neurodynamics, the world’s leading pattern-recognition company. NCorp’s customers include major global players in the financialservices, oil and gas, retail, and telecoms sectors.

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, NCorp is privately held and financed by leadingventure capitalists Apax Partners.

NCorpCambridge Business ParkCowley RoadCambridge, CB4 0WZ

Tel: +44 (0)1223 488500Fax:+44 (0)1223 488501


Contact Name: Martin Blackburn, Head of Sales

No. of Employees: 30

www.ncorp.com

Ijen Profiler

Ijen Agents

Ijen Alerter

Case Study – Understanding anInvestment Bank’s Customers

CORPORATE PROFILE

CONTACT DETAILS

Sagent


www.sagent.com

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Decision-makers can make the right decision when armed with the right information atjust the right time. But deliver that same information a few hours or minutes too late,and it can be disastrous. Delivering the right information at the right time has meantcobbling together disparate data warehouse, data mart, OLAP, reporting, and querytools. It’s a costly and time-consuming approach. And the results are rarely optimisedfor the Web. Now Sagent’s Enterprise Intelligence Solution provides the key with asingle, comprehensive solution.

The Sagent Enterprise Intelligence Solution extracts, transforms, moves, stages, andpresents key information to decision-makers throughout the enterprise in one seamlessenvironment. Sagent gives you the full range of back-end and front-end functionality thatmeans that you can deliver end user solutions in weeks instead of years.

“Getting the right information to the right people at the right time is a significantfactor in our ability to manage risk…. Sagent’s solution allows us to manage our datain all of its different formats, develop tools for analysis, and ultimately deliver itthrough a Web interface.”

MIS Manager – GPU Energy

WEB-BASED ENTERPRISE INTELLIGENCESOLUTIONS

Introduction

Enterprise Intelligence Market Spurred by the promises of lower costs, faster time-to-market, improved sales, and moreefficient operations, companies worldwide have steadily increased their investments inenterprise or business intelligence technology that gathers, distributes, and analysesinformation.

However, companies implementing business intelligence solutions face a number ofobstacles. The first challenge is creating an integrated view of data scattered across theorganisation. Critical information may be distributed across multiple databases andapplications, or may exist in other formats, such as spreadsheets and flat files. These“islands of data” simply cannot support analysis needs. For example, effective financialplanning requires a company-wide view that brings together sales data, purchasinginformation, and multiple departmental budgets. Similarly, understanding and improvingcustomer relationships is only possible by integrating data from sales and marketingapplications, call centre systems, and Web logs.

The second challenge many businesses face is delivering valuable information to all thedecision-makers who require it. No longer the sole province of IT experts or specialisedanalysts, business intelligence is moving into the hands of Web and wireless-based end-users who need to put information to immediate use. As the need for businessintelligence extends more broadly and deeply into the organisation, enabling technologymust be able to scale to handle exponentially greater – and exponentially more complex– user requirements.

Finally, the rapid growth of the Internet and mobile communications technologies and standards is creating a new set of challenges. Not only does the Internet generateand provide access to more information, it has accelerated the pace of change. To remain competitive, companies must use all of their information resources, and theymust deliver the right information at the right time, on the most appropriate device – beit a PDA, mobile phone, or a Web browser – to the decision-makers throughout theorganisation.

Developing solutions that go beyond just providing access to raw data requires completeanalytical applications that transform data into powerful, actionable knowledge thatdrives competitive advantage. Sagent provides a complete business intelligence platformfor analytic applications that consolidates, manages and analyses vast amounts ofenterprise and Web data.

Sagent’s parallel processing architecture delivers superior performance for even thelargest user communities and the most complex analytical requirements. With Sagent’sintegrated business intelligence solution, companies can rapidly implement analyticapplications, widely distribute critical information over public and private networks, anddrive more strategic business decisions.

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SAGENT’S MISSION AND VISION

SAGENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Sagent is a solutions-focused company with a mission to develop, market, and serviceanalytic applications that enable rapid deployment of sophisticated, measurable, andactionable business intelligence for rapidly expanding Web-based user communities.

Sagent’s vision is to put increasingly sophisticated analysis capabilities in the hands of all decision-makers by moving business intelligence from passive, departmentally-focused reporting to active, enterprise-wide analysis. Sagent’s vision is to enableanalytic applications built on proven business rules and metrics, that automaticallysupport the full range of needs across the organisation – at a fraction of the cost, andin a fraction of the time, of other vendors.

To realise this vision, Sagent exploits the fundamental advantages of its technology todeliver robust analytical applications. These advantages include support for complexand cross-functional business requirements, scalable performance that allows real-timeanalysis by large end-user populations, and a back-to-front model that enables rapiddeployment.

Sagent offers an enterprise business intelligence solution that provides decision-makersaccess to all the information they need to understand and improve their business.Sagent’s complete solution reduces implementation costs, simplifies deployment, andmaximises Return on Investment (ROI).

The Sagent Solution is a comprehensive enterprise business intelligence system thatextracts, transforms, moves, stages and presents key information to decision-makers inone seamless environment. Unlike other solutions that keep information locked up inmultiple disparate applications, databases and legacy systems, Sagent delivers all theinformation companies need within a single, integrated system. Sagent ensures superiorperformance for even the largest user populations with the most complex analyticalrequirements, putting sophisticated business intelligence capabilities in the hands ofevery decision-maker and delivering enterprise-class reporting and analysis over theWeb or any wireless device.

Sagent also offers tools for powerful data cleansing, customer relationship enhancement,and spatial enhancement. Analysis capabilities are easily implemented with the SagentSolution or integrated as development software libraries into customer applications.

Sagent Professional Services, a world-class consulting organisation, helps customersget up and running in half the time of competing solutions. Using practical, step-by-step

blueprints and proven knowledge transfertools, Sagent consultants provide a wealth of product and industry expertise. From project definition and applicationdevelopment to deployment, training andongoing support, Sagent ProfessionalServices ensures the success of customers’Enterprise Intelligence solutions.

Sagent has also developed packagedSolutions for the Banking and Insurance sectors as well as a customised Web AnalysisSolution that delivers the actionable information e-businesses need to develop moreeffective Web strategies. This suite of applications analyses and optimises theexperience for Web visitors by combining click-stream data and behaviour patterns withthird-party demographic and firmagraphic data to provide a comprehensiveunderstanding of Web site activity.

Sagent’s recent partnership with SAS Institute provides data mining and campaignmanagement capabilities integrated into the Sagent solution.

Unlike other solutions that keep information locked upin multiple disparate applications, databases and

legacy systems, Sagent delivers all the informationcompanies need within a single, integrated system.

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SAGENT TECHNOLOGY

The Sagent Solution satisfies both IT and end user requirements with a powerfulsolution that includes the full range of back-end and front-end functionality. As a result,Sagent lets companies deploy business intelligence solutions in weeks, instead ofmonths or years.

At the heart of the Sagent Solution are four servers, available on NT and UNIX platforms,each built for performance in a 32-bit, multithreaded, agent-based architecture. The

Sagent Data Load Server provides nativeaccess to relational, mainframe, ERPdatabases, flat files and the Internet andembraces open connectivity standards likeODBC and OLE DB. It enables theExtraction, Transformation and Load (ETL)process and stores data and metadata in adedicated repository. The Sagent DataAccess Server is the interface through whichusers access data and reports. The SagentAutomation Server is an event-drivenscheduler that automates ETL workflow andmanages the periodic refresh of data content.The Sagent WebLink Server is tightlycoupled with the Sagent Data Access Server,bringing powerful business intelligencecapabilities to any Web browser.

The Sagent Portal gives employees,vendors, and customers a single point ofaccess to up-to-date information in ameaningful business context, all on a singleWeb page. Each user’s portal is highlycustomisable, delivering just the informationrelevant to that individual’s role and area of

expertise in the organisation. The Portal not only provides insight into information in thedata warehouse or data mart, but also from virtually any other source, including the Web.

Sagent provides a number of powerful administrative and client tools that simplifymanagement and information access. Sagent Admin enables system and databaseadministrators to manage Sagent data stores, providing a single, integrated view ofmultiple databases and applications. Sagent Design Studio is a graphical, drag-and-drop user interface for designing ETL workflow and metadata structures that support ad-hoc queries and sophisticated analysis. The Sagent Solution also includes a full setof integrated tools for analysis of multidimensional and relational data (Sagent Analysis),statistical analysis (StatView for Sagent), and enterprise reporting (Sagent Reports).

Sagent iStudio, a true thin-client ad-hoc query, reporting and analysis application, is aneasy-to-use Web application that leverages Sagent’s parallel data flow and Web servertechnologies to deliver the analytic power of Sagent’s transformation libraries to everyuser in the organisation. Featuring a state-of-the-art user interface, iStudio lets users ofall types quickly create and share sophisticated queries, reports, and multidimensionalOLAP views. iStudio allows organisations with large user populations to deploy easilycustomisable analytic applications on a mass scale using the latest highly affordable andscalable server architectures for Windows and Solaris. Rapid ROI is ensured through theuse of an established, proven information delivery framework that sets the industrystandard for ease of implementation and maintenance.

Performance Breakthroughs The Sagent Solution delivers a number of performance breakthroughs. Designed andbuilt specifically to leverage 4-tier Web networks (encompassing the database server,Web server, application server, and client), the Sagent Solution moves data efficientlyand swiftly from back-end sources to end users, even in narrow-bandwidthenvironments. Distributed processing, parallel, multithreaded servers, intelligentcaching and Sagent’s unique Report Stream technology make the Sagent Solutionuniquely suited for environments that scale to thousands of users.

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Founded in 1995, Sagent is a publicly quoted company on the Nasdaq exchange undersymbol SGNT. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Sagent has offices in 26countries. In Europe, there are offices in UK, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, and isrepresented by partners in other countries. Sagent can be found on the Web at:www.sagent.com.

More than 1,500 companies have selected Sagent solutions to enhance customerretention, cross-sell/up-sell, improve customer service, increase efficiencies of marketingcampaigns, streamline business operations, analyse financials, and reduce costs.

Customers include: AT&T; BP Amoco; Boeing Employees Credit Union; Canal+; CGU;Carrefour; Bristol Meyers; British Telecom; California State Automobile Association;Citibank; First National Bank; Guinness UDV; Glaxo SmithKline; GPU Energy; Johnson& Johnson (UK); Kemper National Insurance; Nationwide Building Society; Pfizer;SunGard Securities; Safeway Siemens; Telecom South Africa; and Yellow Pages

Sagent has strategic relationships with partners such as: Advent; Commerce One;Compaq; EDS; IBM; Microsoft; NEC; SAS; Seibel; and Sun. Sagent is a part of theBusiness Objects Data Integration Initiative.

CORPORATE PROFILE

CONTACT DETAILS

Sagent UK Ltd.100 Longwater AvenueGreen ParkReadingBerkshireRG2 6GP

Tel: +44 (0)118 945 0400

Email: [email protected]

Contact Name: Bharat Mistry

www.sagent.com

BUTLER GROUPMANAGEMENT GUIDES

Management Guides provide an in-depth analysis of the business issues andtechnologies relevant to a particular topic. Butler Group Analysts write a comprehensiveoverview of the topic being addressed and prominent suppliers are invited to submittheir own editorial, including diagrams.

eCRM

Application Service Provision

Mobile Extended Enterprise

Enterprise NT and Windows 2000

E-Business

Knowledge Management

Application Integration

Component-Based Development

Electronic Commerce

Network Client/Server

Extranet Technologies

Business Intelligence

Enterprise Database Technologies

Data Webs

Java Technologies in the Enterprise

Year 2000 Strategies

All previously published Management Guides have a dedicated page on Butler Group’sWeb site under ‘Publications’ at:

www.butlergroup.com

Previous Management Guide titlesinclude:

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