The Business Blog

Changed priorities for the 2010 CFO – Business Intelligence moves to top of the agenda

2010-03-05T14:40:00Z

IBM have just released their 2010 study of over 1,900 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and senior finance executives from across the globe and the verdict is that “Cost reduction matters to today's CFO, but not as much as getting stuck in to wider corporate business decisions. Playing their part in the wider corporate strategy is now the top priority for CFOs who no longer rank cost reduction at the top of their agenda.”

"Their priorities for the next three years were to cut the enterprise cost base, make decisions faster and provide more transparency to external stakeholders."

That statement makes a refreshing change given the current economic climate, it indicates that CFOs are starting to think about gearing for growth and I believe that Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) are core to delivering each of those priorities:

Cut the enterprise cost base

With a comprehensive and organization wide reporting strategy CFOs can easily identify areas of the business that are not performing and becoming a drain on resources. A well designed BI solution can reveal and explain why one area of the business is most efficient than another and then steps can be taken to reduce cost. Subsequently effective budgeting, planning and forecasting can then control the cost reduction efforts.

Make faster decisions

To make not only faster decisions but better and more informed ones it is critical that people at all levels of the business are provided with accurate and timely information in a format that is easy to access. Portal based reporting, dashboard and scorecard solutions can provide part of that answer; they enables up-to-date information to be shared so everyone is working from the same ‘one version of the truth’. Automating business processes can also prove invaluable, improving process control and accuracy and slashing effort and time requirements.

Provide more transparency

If you can measure it then you can report and manage it. Saying “I don’t know” just doesn’t cut it these days, people want answers, they want they quickly and on their terms. Providing those answers provides external stakeholders with the confidence that things are going well or helps identify potential issues early enough to mitigate them before they have a chance to develop.

It is often said that Information is Power and for CFO nothing could be truer. Without the facts they simply cannot be expected to perform their role effectively and BI and PM play a pivotal role in providing them. Strategic decision making is no small matter and requires a well integrated and comprehensive data capture, reporting and analysis environment. The good news is that one thing that CFOs can’t complain about these days is a lack of quality tools to provide the solution.

The quotes in this post were taken from the Finance Week website that delivers topical, practical content to senior finance professionals in UK industry: http://www.financeweek.co.uk/topic/career-ladder/changed-priorities-2010-cfo/32194

PowerPivot BI for the Cloud – Give it a REST!

2009-11-23T14:18:39Z

If you’re a regular reader of the Altius Community blogs, you’ll have seem an increasing amount of activity around PowerPivot (formerly Gemini) as a BI tool delivered as part of Office 2010, with significant enhancements when used in conjunction with the upcoming SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010.

PowerPivot

We had the pleasure of hosting an event in London last week with Donald Farmer, the Microsoft BI Programme Manager, presenting his thoughts on BI and how it is evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of Enterprise-consumers.

PowerPivot is a great tool to help straddle the gulf between what ‘the business’ needs in terms of access to information, familiarity in terms of how to use it etc and the IT needs around governance, control and availability. PowerPivot delivers the flexibility and power of Excel to the business user, whilst providing control and making the most of the investment in back-end quality, scalable data sources provided by IT.

Cloud Computing

One of the big changes (and the cause of a lot of turbulence) in the IT world at the moment is the concept of ‘Cloud Computing’. Microsoft’s model for this is ‘Software + Services’ (S+S) – identifying that a mix of on-premise and off-premise systems is an appropriate answer, enabling the economies of scale, flexibility and dynamism to be gained from Software + Services e.g. provisioning services more rapidly and cost effectively in ‘the cloud’.

One of the key challenges in Business Intelligence is providing access to the right information at the right time. Doing so internally with Microsoft BI is one part of that story. Integrating cloud-based data with in-house data is a large part of the S+S model and will help deliver massive gain as the model breaks down the walls between internal and external systems and information.

That’s nice, but I don’t have full S+S yet

The chances are that your organisation is using some kind of Cloudware already – whether it’s website statistics monitoring, SalesForce.com for CRM, facilities management software or one of a growing army of applications that have a tight fit for the benefits of cloud computing. Many organisations are benefitting from this model, but are struggling to integrate the information they contain with internally available data – so how do you make the most of the data already in these systems? REST and PowerPivot may be the answer.

PowerPivot – Give it a REST

REST (Representational State Transfer – but let’s ignore how techy that sounds for now) is a web services protocol that is growing in popularity as a great (and simple) way for applications to provide a common way to interact. REST provides a formal pattern for communicating with applications in a service oriented architecture (SOA), allowing you to ‘consume services’ in a logical way rather than have to know technical details of how it is implemented. SOA is widely adopted in Cloudware / software as a service applications already as a way to ‘glue’ applications together – you can use it too!

PowerPivot provides, out of the box, directly in Excel, the ability to consume REST-compliant services from anywhere, allowing non-technical users to gain access to the information within your cloud-based systems, mine it, combine it with other external (and internal) sources and use it to support business-critical decision making.

Connecting to an external service is available from the simple menu in PowerPivot (allowing you to also consume data already embedded within internal Reporting Services reports right next to external ‘Other Feeds’):

From there, you simply provide the address to the REST services that your Cloudware vendor provides:

(In this example I’m using a publicly available data on purchase orders provided as part of Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative and the District of Columbia’s publicly available purchasing data - http://ogdi.cloudapp.net/v1/dc/PurchaseOrders/).

From here PowerPivot handles the details of the queries and protocols for you, allowing you to connect live to the data and treat it as any other table of data within PowerPivot or Excel – making it very much a ‘power excel user’ feature. From here you can start to filter, slice-and-dice, aggregate, analyse and report. If you can use Pivot Tables, you’ll be up and running in minutes!

Built something great? Share(Point) it

With SharePoint 2010, you’ll also be able to share the PowerPivot models you’ve built with your team. Sharing & Collaborating using PowerPivot models enables them to become the one validated source of information for you and your team – delivering high-quality, connected and up-to-date, self-service BI without resorting to hundreds of versions of linked, e-mailed and out of date Excel files.

Find out more

If you’re interested in finding out how you can employ Microsoft BI – often using software your organisation is already licensed for – get in touch to discuss your needs and we can point you in the right direction.

Matt.Quinn@altiusconsulting.com

Xobni Enterprise – Bringing BI to your Inbox

2009-11-02T18:08:00Z

Xobni - www.xobni.com have today launched the Enterprise edition of their family of Outlook plug-in products designed to make you more efficient in the way in which you interact with one of the biggest untapped corporate data resources – your inbox!

As a free outlook add-in (along with the $30 Xobni Plus edition with its enhanced features and performance) Xobni has been downloaded by over 3 Million users. It’s snowballing popularity is highlighted by Bill Gates’ decision to use Xobni as a demonstration of the power of Outlook (and Office) as a developer platform.

So what’s it all about?

Xobni is about ‘taking back your inbox’. Since installing it some three months ago, I’m not sure I could live without it anymore. I won’t go into detail on the out of the box features as they’re well covered in detail here: http://www.xobni.com/learnmore/

What you see with Xobni in Outlook:

Where Xobni gets really interesting from a Business Intelligence & Performance Management perspective is with today’s launch of Xobni Enterprise.

Xobni Enterprise delivers what users love about Xobni, whilst meeting corporate IT needs – primarily ease of management through centralised deployment and configuration; tighter control over which extensions are available and to whom (e.g. call centre users don’t get Twitter or Facebook access, but sales guys do get LinkedIn for example) and, and this is the biggy, the ability to create and deploy custom extensions.

So what’s that got to do with BI?

BI means many things to many people, but here at Altius we believe Businss Intelligence is about turning the reams of data within an organisation into decision-quality information that enables better decision making. When you think about it, where does most of the information you make decisions on live? Where do you go to confirm the prices agreed on a contract? Where do you look to find the white paper or product catalogue before making a purchase? The likely answer is your inbox (or one of it’s hundreds of sub-folders, calendar invites and contact cards).

Given the unstructured nature of the inbox, it’s often difficult to find what you’re looking for and easy to get distracted, wasting millions of corporate hours and costing businesses an estimated $900 Billion each year in the US alone. Xobni helps to bring order the chaos of the inbox and now, with Xobni Enterprise, we can help deliver information from corporate data systems in the same way. Xobni Enterprise enables us to extend the delivery of right time, right place information by connecting information from portal, CRM and back-office systems right into the user’s Outlook window in the context of their current conversations. By providing a context-sensitive Xobni Enterprise window into corporate systems such as SharePoint, Oracle, SAP and line-of-business applications we can support end-users’ abilities to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.

The custom extensions library already comes equipped with SharePoint and SalesForce.com connectors allowing you to quickly pull additional data from those corporate silos into Outlook and position it inline with the conversation you’re having – right time, right place.

In addition to the ‘out of the box’ extensions, we as a Xobni Partner, can help you create custom extensions through the Xobni Enterprise APIs to deliver any other information you require, queried based upon the context of the e-mail the user has selected.

Custom Extensions in action

One example integration is the delivery of Bing Maps for Enterprise (formerly Virtual Earth) as a Xobni Enterprise extension. When linked to our geographical data reporting solutions (e.g. sales data for the currently selected sales rep, or location based information as part of an asset tracking application), this could quickly allow sales managers or call centre reps to gain insight into the performance or location of the person they are in conversation with.

In the screenshot below for example, we utilise the e-mail address of the current contact, query a reporting solution and deliver a customised Bing Maps for Enterprise rendering directly into Xobni, centered on the contact’s location.

This could easily be overlaid with additional data – for example selecting a territory manager might deliver sales performance data for that manager across the region, rendered over the map. At a glance, the sales director is then able to put conversations with the manager into the frame of current performance.

Find out more

Xobni Enterprise is hot off the press, launched only this morning at San Francisco’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. Over the coming weeks, we’re talking to dozens of IT Managers, Business users and Enterprise Architects to understand how Xobni can work for them. If you’d like to find out more, see a demo of the functionality OR if you are already loving Xobni and want to discuss a custom extension for your business or place a Xobni Enterprise order – get in touch – matt.quinn@altiusconsulting.com

Press Release: http://www.xobni.com/press/11012009_enterprise.php
Xobni Enterprise Product: http://www.xobni.com/enterprise

Retailers invest in IT to help cut costs

2009-04-30T05:27:27Z

In a tough economic climate it would be easy to assume that IT budgets might be cut. IT is however being hailed by many retailers as a high-return investment opportunity to help reduce costs, improve customer service and ultimately increase profitability. It is also a strategic choice, improving service levels, customer retention and market share today will place those who’ve make wise technology investments in the strongest position as the economy returns to growth in the coming years (as well as helping keen the business lean right now).

Angelica Mari’s article in Computing earlier this month highlights specific examples of where forward looking retailers are seizing the day.

Computing - Selling the value of IT

Take a look at our recent Waterstone’s case study and call us on 01483 418 628 to find out more about the business intelligence solutions we can help your retail business with today.

SharePoint – now with added BI!

2009-04-16T10:19:37Z

Following the consolidation of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server’s Monitoring & Analytics components into the SharePoint Enterprise CAL (and the future provision of this as ‘PerformancePoint Services’ in the next release) many existing SharePoint license holders (particularly those with the e-CAL and Software Assurance) may have just inherited the rights to use the powerful Analytical components, but don’t know it.

Does your company use SharePoint? If you do, you may now be entitled to put these powerful analytical tools into your teams hands for very little input – we can help you determine if you are eligible and shape what valuable information you can provide from your existing back-end systems investment right into the hands of your users.

Get in touch to find our what you’re missing.

Matt.Quinn@altiusconsulting.com OR call +44 (0) 1483 418628

Cost Reduction & Scenario Based Planning

2009-02-24T18:12:04Z

Cost reduction and enhanced planning are hot-topics in the current economic climate. Doug Guess, CFO at Servigistics made some interesting comments in Finance Week on how bringing simple home-truths into cost management can deliver significant value back to shareholders and the business.

During boom times sales and revenue growth are the key concerns. As the market has cooled (dramatically) the need and opportunity to re-examine your businesses underlying cost-base presents itself there is an opportunity deliver huge savings, but you need the information upon which to base these decisions and to ensure that whilst reducing costs you are not hampering your ability to make the most of an economic bounce-back in the future.

There are two fundamental and complementary concepts at play here:

Cost & Profitability Analysis; and
Scenario-based Planning;

Effective cost and profitability analysis provides the baseline information of your current world upon which to take immediate action. Scenario-based planning ensures that when making forward-looking plans you have catered for all eventualities across your industries variables - cost of capital, price of materials, cost of labour, energy prices etc.

We are running a series of Essential Business Breakfasts covering this and other Business Essentials topics in the coming weeks and months. Why not register to attend and find out more?

Take unnecessary costs out of your business quickly - introducing Oracle Hyperion Profitability & Cost Management (HPCM)
Tuesday 24th March 2009 - Central London
Planning in uncertain times - Breaking out of Excel Hell
Thursday 23rd April 2009 - Central London

Feel free to contact Polly Daghorn on 01483 418 628 or Polly.Daghorn@altiusconsulting.com to secure your place.

References:

Finance Week Article - Doug Guess

Business Intelligence 101 - by Robert Flanglin

2009-02-24T10:39:14Z

A colleague of mine recently sent me a link to Robert's description of "What BI is". I think it's a great layman's terms description of what BI is, why we do it and where it comes from - it's not just about technology - it's a fundamental commercial process. This excerpt is from Robert's posting at Business Intelligence 101 by Robert Flanglin :

The goal of every business is to be successful by gaining new customers and retaining old customers. A crucial way of achieving this end is through “Business Intelligence.” Business intelligence is also known as simply BI. Business intelligence can be defined as a process of collecting information in the area of business. An essential idea of business is that data is enhanced into information and then into knowledge. Business use BI to gain an advantage in the marketplace by understanding their customer’s needs, customer’s decision-making processes, and economic, cultural, and technological trends. Business intelligence involves analyzing not only the customer but the entire industry as a whole. Finally, business intelligence is driven by a goal set by the company. The goal can be short term or long term.

History of Business Intelligence

Business intelligence was first referred to in Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” Tzu claimed that in order to win a war you had to have complete knowledge and understand of your strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your enemy. This is the core idea behind modern business intelligence. A company must know itself better than anyone else, and know its customers and competitors better than anyone else. It is ironic how much business and warfare are alike. In BI, one must sift through heaps of data (both external and internal) for management to then device strategies for marketing and where to take the business.

Key Performance Indicators

In BI, the present state of business is assessed by the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Data is becoming available to businesses faster as more organizations implement KPI. In the past, data was available after one or two months, which did not help businesses adjust their strategies in a timely manner. More recently, however, banks have tried to make data available sooner and with shorter intervals, especially for businesses that have higher operational/credit risk loading (I.E. wealth management and credit cards). Some companies can get data weekly, which helps them adjust their strategies more efficiently than ever before.

Business Intelligence Tools

Business intelligence involves collecting quite a bit of information and analyzing it. Many business use tools to achieve this. A few of the data tools are data modeling, data warehouses, and data mining. Data tools help employees collect the data and analyze it efficiently. Data tools are for organizational purposes mostly. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is used in the analyzing process. OLAP is sometimes simply referred to as Analytics, which is based on the hypercube or “cube” and dimensional analysis.

Some businesses also use software vendors for BI tools. There are quite a few enterprises offering BI technology. If a business does not get the BI tools themselves, then software vendor will provide a business with tools, and sometimes software support and BI professionals who will help the company analyze results and collect data. Some companies providing BI software are Siebel Systems, Microsoft, Altius Consulting, Business-Soft, and SAS Institute.

Conclusion

Businesses understand that knowing the customer is the key to success. Business intelligence is the path through which a business can collect data about the customer and analyze it. Business intelligence is also about knowing the market, including competitors and market trends. A business that has the most accurate understanding of its marketplace will be more adequately prepared for the continual changes that inevitable occur in markets. Business intelligence is an important concept for any company to understand, because it will help them to gain new customers, retain old customers, and see a positive ROI.

Robert Flanglin writes about a variety of business topics and specializes in Business Intelligence. Robert Flanglin writes for the Business Intelligence Journal (http://www.businessintelligencejournal.com).

Budgeting, Planning & Consolidation doesn't live and die with PerformancePoint

2009-02-03T14:00:59Z

Many of you may be aware that Microsoft have recently decided to repackage functionality previously badged as Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server (see the announcement below). Effectively they are moving the Monitoring & Analytics components (Dashboard tools, web-based analytical components & what used to be Business Scorecard Manager) into the SharePoint Enterprise CAL or e-CAL.

Many users, partners and clients will be at first glance disappointed to hear that the Planning component of PerformancePoint is being sidelined with the next Service Pack (SP3) being the last set of significant enhancements.

It is important however to take a balanced view of the changes and how they may affect you. Budgeting, Planning and Consolidation processes lived and thrived long before PerformancePoint Planning's relatively recent introduction and those looking for a best-of-breed solution still have many options from both Microsoft and other vendors - including established offerings from the likes of Oracle's Essbase and Hyperion Planning; and for those looking to build upon a cohesive Microsoft BI stack can take confidence that we have been delivering solutions to these problems with Microsoft tools for many years.

At Altius, we had delivered Planning solutions based upon the Microsoft BI stack to dozens of clients before PerformancePoint was even a glint in a product manager's eye. With global rollouts of a solid Microsoft BI-delivered Management Information solution operating for BP globally, along with many other clients utilising similar solutions we are well placed to continue to deliver solid, cost-effective solutions to the SME and Global FTSE 100 alike.

Many Microsoft partners who invested in Planning functionality for the first time with PerformancePoint will be having a tough time. Where their experience in the real commercial drivers behind such a solution is based solely around a piece of technology (PerformancePoint Planning) rather than a genuine need and business process, their planning practices are likely to suffer. Those who engaged with Planning because is came bundled with the Monitoring components they specialised in will find solace in the fact that those components will become available to all those with SharePoint Enterprise licenses (and Software Assurance) and will be in a position to offer those services to a broader set of clients who now have the licenses to deliver enhance benefits to their businesses as part of SharePoint, but those partners will be unlikely to have a strong enough Budgeting, Planning & Consolidation offering to continue to make the best offering to clients in that market.

Our 15 year heritage in helping clients deliver value to their business, not based solely upon what a product does 'out of the box', but upon the drivers that they need to make their business successful has put us in a unique position to support you, our customers. I look forward to working with you to showcase the great solutions we've delivered for multi-national clients such as BP and a host of other organisations - before, through and beyond the demise of, PerformancePoint Planning.

For reference, I've included some common questions and answers relating to PerformancePoint's path over the coming months below. If you'd like more information or would like to discuss how this affects your company's BI roadmap, feel free to drop me a line on planningisthefuture@altiusconsulting.com or call +44 (0) 1483 418 628 and ask for Matt Quinn.

The statements below are from a Microsoft release - it's provided as-is, with no warranty for errors or omissions:

Announcement:
Microsoft is announcing an update to its Microsoft Business Intelligence roadmap. Microsoft’s strategy is to deliver BI to everyone in the organization through the broadly adopted tools of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office Excel, and built on the scalable Microsoft SQL Server BI platform. Based on customer feedback, we are moving the scorecard, dashboard, and analytic functionality from Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server into Office SharePoint Server Enterprise, making these capabilities available throughout the organization at a lower TCO. In mid 2009, we will release PerformancePoint Server 2007 “service pack 3” which will include updates to the current product’s planning module. Thereafter, customers should not expect further investment in standalone versions of PerformancePoint Server. However, ongoing support of our planning customers is a high priority. These changes enable customers to deploy a complete BI solution with existing investments in SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Excel, the most widely used analysis and planning tool in market today.

Q&A:

1. What will happen to PerformancePoint Server?
PerformancePoint Server 2007 will no longer be a standalone item on the Microsoft price list as of April 1, 2009. For organizations interested in PerformancePoint Server, it can be obtained by purchasing SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL with Software Assurance. In the future, the monitoring and analytics capabilities will be included in the next release of SharePoint Server and will be available to SharePoint Enterprise CAL customers. Customers with rights to PerformancePoint Server SP3 will be able to download it mid 2009 (please contact your account manager [or partner] for details). Performance management is a critical component of business intelligence and Microsoft will continue marketing and R&D investment in this area in future product releases.

2. What about from now until SharePoint ‘v-next’?
How will I obtain the current PerformancePoint monitoring and analytics functionality for broad BI deployment?
From the date of this announcement, PerformancePoint Server will be a license entitlement for SharePoint Server 2007 E-CAL customers with Software Assurance only. The technical requirement to use PerformancePoint planning will continue to be SQL Server Enterprise Edition. Customers will be able to use BI throughout their entire organizations simply by deploying SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Excel.

3. What about support for existing PerformancePoint Server planning customers?
Customer care is our primary focus during this transition. We will keep our commitments to deliver improved planning capabilities in PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP3 in mid 2009 that addresses many of the features and functionality required by our customers to leverage in their planning projects. We will continue to support all PerformancePoint customers per our existing support policy. For further details on this policy visit: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=12922.

4. What about legacy products such as ProClarity and Business Scorecard Manager?
ProClarity Analytics Server and ProClarity Desktop Pro are PerformancePoint Server 2007 Software Assurance benefits, and Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) is a downgrade right of PerformancePoint Server 2007. By the Office ‘v-next’ timeframe, we expect much of the ProClarity Analytics Server functionality to be moved into SharePoint Server and Excel. As for Business Scorecard Manager and ProClarity Desktop Pro, we don’t anticipate any further customer demand for these products as a result of this news.

5. Will customers still be able to purchase PerformancePoint Server if they require more licenses for an existing deployment?
No, not as a standalone product. If customers require additional PerformancePoint Server 2007 CALs, they should purchase SharePoint Server 2007 E-CALs with Software Assurance to be entitled to PerformancePoint Server 2007 CALs.

6. If I have additional questions, who do I contact?
If you have additional questions, please first work with your [Microsoft Gold Partner or] Microsoft account team. If you have additional questions following that, you can contact PerformancePoint Server Roadmap Announce team pps_an@microsoft.com.

Markets close as America decides

2008-11-04T21:28:58Z

So, the markets have closed on Decision-Day in the US and the Nasdaq has seen a six day rally with double-digit growth during the week. As poles indicate a strong likelihood of a White House win for Obama the markets are playing to what looks like a less uncertain market - with democratic control over Congress, the Senate and what now looks set to be a White House win the ability for decisive policy making would be stronger than ever.

Upon the close of markets analysts are almost writing off the probability of a Republican win. Typical election campaigns see a post-election rally, but with the 90%+ probability of a Democratic presidential win, markets have already aligned themselves accordingly. With that level of confidence, some analysts are wondering whether the last six days trading, and particularly today's trading, mean that we've already had the 'post' election rally.

As business prepares for more anti-business, tougher labour policy, higher taxes on high income brackets etc the ability to analyse the underlying cost base, quickly adapt budgets forecasts and plans will be essential. Fundamentally strong industries such as minerals, oil, gas and energy have rallied today on the increase of oil prices. As diverse sectors continue to work hard to attract capital, strip costs, maintain competitive advantage and drive future revenue they will have to look to information and the technology and processes that deliver it to differentiate themselves.

There has never been a better time to examine your information assets, ensure you're making the most of them and prepare your business to be at the top of every investors list as the markets commence a recovery cycle over the next 12-18 months.

Business Intelligence - A Parallel Approach

2008-10-11T17:34:20Z

Boris Evelson, Principal Analyst at research company Forrester presented an eye opening session at this week's Business Intelligence conference in Seattle. The theme of the conference being "Think Bigger About BI" couldn't be better embodied than it is in Boris.

The question and resulting definition of what Business Intelligence is, is not an easy one and the more people you have in the room, the more different answers and opinions (some of them heated!) you will get. In the interests of thinking bigger, I wholeheartedly believe that Boris' definition works on every level. Boris' definition of BI, taken from Boris' profile at forrester.com is summarised below:

"a set of processes, methodologies, and technologies used to transform raw data into meaningful, useful, and action-oriented enterprise information"

The most significant observation in that definition, one that many product-centric organisations and technophiles miss, is that BI is not in itself simply technology. It is not a product, it is not a piece of software and there is no "one size fits all" or silver bullet. BI is about people, processes and tools that deliver the meaningful, useful, actionable information in Boris' definition.

So if BI is not simply a product that you can buy, plug in and turn on - how do you get it?

In his talk at the conference, Boris talked of a parallel approach. A pragmatic programme to set you on the right path for a successful BI journey. In short, Boris' recommends starting by creating both a strategic vision of where you would like to be and identifying and taking the smallest possible baby-steps to get there - start with the lowest hanging fruit, something that can be delivered in weeks not months, costs thousands not millions and delivers immediate value to the business.

The most pertinent piece of advice that Boris offers is that selecting the right, experienced partner is crucial. Business Intelligence is personal, both to your organisation and to the way you work. Business Intelligence is a long-term strategic vision delivered, starting in baby steps, over a period of years. The first steps must be taken on solid ground and with confidence. An experienced architect and implementation partner are critical to success. Now as an experienced BI consultant I would say that, but Boris' opinion underlines the need - don't take my word for it, you can read Boris' paper "It's time to reinvent your BI strategy" for yourself.

Does compliance have to be at odds with Business Benefits?

2008-08-15T10:34:31Z

Richard Day considers how firms can be compliant and competitive.

Compliance within the financial services industry covers a diverse and complex set of business arenas – from Basel II and now Basel III, through to Treating Customers Fairly (TCF). When designing a program to meet compliance requirements, significant opportunity exists to build in delivery of commercial benefit to provide a greater return on investment. For example, TCF Management Information activities will require the analysis and management of significant volumes of customer-profiled data. Using this information to support wider programs such as customer profitability analysis, product up-sell and 'lifestyle' banking can turn the impact on the bottom line when implementing commercially-aware compliance applications from a pure-cost to a revenue opportunity.

Compliance is becoming a key differentiator among financial services institutions (FSIs), and already some forward thinking FSIs are starting to reap the profits of an integrated compliance management strategy, while others struggle with the costs of more fragmented approaches that result in high levels of waste and duplication. This gap will only widen as regulatory requirements increase and as the cost and complexity of compliance swells. By all counts, it is the more holistic approach that will not only enable compliance in the future, but also result in improved speed-to-market, decreased costs, reduced risk, an enhanced customer experience and bottom-line benefits to the business.

Mark Din, Compliance Manager at moneysupermarket.com says: "Many of our activities are in fact unregulated, but we apply the Financial Services Authority's (FSA) high-level principals as a best practice. We believe forward-looking companies can and should look at the productivity enhancements that well-executed and well-communicated compliance programs can deliver. Users that are responsible for creating and capturing data that may be subject to external scrutiny can greatly benefit from the automation of repetitive tasks, better use of approved contract templates, and seamless capture of key customer correspondence. These time-saving and error-minimising activities can be easily translated into measurable productivity gains for our professionals while fully supporting compliance programs."

Leveraging collaborative information products integrated into the Microsoft Office system can help to ensure that the data stored in the diverse and entrenched banking systems is available quickly, simply and accurately to support informed decision-making. Products such as SharePoint Server and PerformancePoint Server, in conjunction with the traditional Microsoft Office tools, allow the collation of information from wide-reaching areas of the business. By bringing together data from your existing banking platforms, financial reporting and enterprise resource planning systems, combining them with customer intelligence information and making them available to a wider audience within your team, you can empower cohesive analysis of information from across the business – simplifying and consolidating compliance programmes, while delivering significant tangible benefits in improving business performance.

Companies that focus heavily on the end output of their business systems and view compliance purely from a record-retention perspective, risk losing the opportunity to simplify their activities and better serve the needs of their customers. Successful compliance practices not only meet the letter of the law, but also the greater purpose of such regulation – better protection of client data and enhanced visibility into core practices. Creating consistent and structured information gathering and tracking its use as it flows through the business helps firms better achieve revenue growth as well as bottom-line cost reduction.

Altius Consulting financial director Jonathan Cowle stresses the importance of reputation in the industry: "The greatest risk for an institution that needs to be beyond reproach, such as an FSI, is its corporate image, and particularly the trust in its brand. The reputation risk is followed by the high cost of non-compliance, and we are all aware of the huge fines that regulators have imposed. However, there are other values that are often overlooked in the operational and strategy areas. A company in good control of its business processes creates a structure that results in lower operational risk for the institution, and the executive team with such a strong corporate governance culture can then focus on strategy execution. On the other hand, at institutions challenged by compliance, attention is continually focused on remedial controls and oversight."

A firm needs to reach a point where compliance and risk management has evolved into a series of transparent business practices that are clearly visible to shareholders, regulators, employers and suppliers, enabling the company to run a true business scorecard across the enterprise. Ultimately, a successful compliance program should not be a burden, but should speed overall business processes and unlock the full potential of a customer-focused business.

Many organisations approach compliance negatively, driven by a fear of being non-compliant combined with a reluctance to spend more funds to streamline compliance processes. Progressive companies have begun to realise the potential benefits of replacing time-consuming, manually driven processes with a digital document and content management solution. Such a digital environment will streamline business operations across the entire organisation and provide a large return on investment. This view of compliance allows companies to reduce the cost of doing business, get closer to clients, uncover trends, and ultimately improve competitive advantage.

With compliance spending expected to escalate by the end of 2007, financial institutions need to make sure that their compliance efforts are not just a necessary evil, but an investment for the long term. To be considered successful, an organisation must leverage its investment in common processes, rule engines, integrated systems, best practices and real-time analytics, all of which provide the foundation for an effective compliance infrastructure.

"Compliance is now a fact of life for the financial services Industry," says Ian Wilkinson, retail banking industry manager for Microsoft in the UK. "We are now seeing second- or third-generation compliance initiatives such as Basel III impact the sector. However, there are significant business benefits to be achieved through adherence to best practice and rationalisation of processes. Many UK businesses are now seeing that the American model dictated by the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) act of 2002 as the opportunity to improve organisational control and investor confidence. According to IDC over 40 per cent of UK mid-size companies are evaluating or deploying technology to reduce costs and mitigate risks."

When carried out correctly with the best technology, adhering to regulations is not only good for business, but allows firms to get closer to clients and improve customer service. The resulting overall improvement in competitive advantage is the ultimate measure of success for compliance practices.

Richard Day is director of new business at Altius Consulting.

Collaboration - Making the Connection

2008-08-11T08:36:00Z

Enterprise Collaboration is about more than connecting data - it's about bringing people, information and knowledge together from across your business. There are many components of such a solution including people, process and technology. This quarter's edition of Retail Speak examines collaboration in a Retail context in a 4-page special feature (Retail Speak - Autumn 2008).

Waterstone's Creates Company-wide Portal

2008-07-28T16:23:34Z

From this week's Retail Week, there was an interesting article by Joanna Perry, the Technology Editor about the Waterstone's integrated Business Intelligence Portal:

Published: 23 July 2008 10:14

Author: Joanna Perry
More by this Author
Last Updated: 23 July 2008 10:16
Reader Responses

Facts over fiction: Waterstone’s reporting platform will be extended to store level

Waterstone's has created a single data warehouse and a web-based reports platform in a project costing less than £500,000.

The platform was soft launched to a group of users in March and has now been extended to all head office functions. The bookseller also intends to extend the platform's use to store level.

The system provides staff with standard and ad-hoc business reports, accessed via a web browser. Data is available on sales and stock levels from all channels, as well as certain information on the retailer's loyalty scheme.

Waterstone's commercial director Neil Jewsbury said that the information the platform provides would assist with the rapid expansion of the retailer's online channel and particularly help the company understand its customers better.

He said: "We created lots of interesting facts before, but now we are creating interesting facts that are driving people to do something."

Each user sees a welcome page when they log into the portal, with key performance indicators relevant to their role. All head office users can drill down from the standard top-level reports into more detailed data – such as sales of a title at the store level.

Waterstone's worked with Altius Consulting on the project, and has been able to set up the portal at very little cost using Windows SharePoint Services.

Previously, reports – which were often contradictory – were pulled from data in various legacy systems. Staff often held their own information in Excel spreadsheets.

The data warehouse standardises information pulled in from different sources so it is easy to create reports. In addition, data from external sources, such as Nielsen, is taken into the platform.

Jewsbury plans to include conversion rates generated by a customer counting system the retailer has introduced.

Original Article

Energy Prices Cause for Consolidation?

2008-06-19T12:04:14Z

With much analysis of the rising cost of energy on consumers' wallets, the impact on business and particularly of IT is often overlooked.

According to research 89% of UK businesses have no insight into their IT energy bill and 76% have set no targets to reduce power consumption. As the volume of data being stored, the number of uses for it and the complexity of delivering the resulting information to the business grows, so the power demand expands - combine this with rising energy prices and costs are set to grow exponentially.

Intelligent application of both technology and applications can help ensure the surge in oil and gas prices doesn't hit your budget. Virtualisation is a growing field and as stability, cost and performance begin to deliver on the promise this can be a way to consolidate many systems into a smaller number of more efficient servers.

More fundamentally however, designing the applications the business demand in a fashion that drives efficiency at a higher level will see greater benefits - For example the application of a centralised data warehouse containing corporate information from across the business - sales, finance, operations, IT, HR - provides one source for users to get up-to-date, accurate information without the need to horde thousands of Excel spreadsheets across hundreds de-centralised file servers spread out across your IT estate. Not to mention the commercial benefits of the added context available by linking information from diverse sources throughout the business.

Supply vs. Demand - A point to ponder

Providing servers that are more efficient and applying technologies such as Virtualisation is a great low-level step, helping on the supply-side of the problem - changing behaviours to reduce demand for unnecessary servers and ad-hoc file storage is surely the bigger challenge?

References:

Surge in oil prices hits IT - Computing

Only 16% of firms budget accurately - are the rest in Excel-Hell?

2008-04-15T15:27:21Z

According to Finance Week (http://www.financeweek.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=6073), in a survey only 16% of firms are performing budgeting accurately and highlights significant issues in the financial planning process. Apparently 76% of respondents stated that they used Excel heavily in the budgeting, forecasting and planning process. That is not to say that Excel is the problem - it is more of a statement about how is used (or more appropriately misused).

Microsoft Excel is probably the most popular desktop application in the world. It has revolutionised how we manage numeric data over the past twenty years. Excel does, however, have its limitations. Excessive dependence on Excel spreadsheets for reporting and analysis can lead to ‘Excel-Hell’. You can see this exhibited via a number of symptoms:

A ‘one question many answers’ syndrome - because everyone has their own version of the truth;
A high degree of effort required every time the smallest thing changes; and
Excel is a private data store rather than a corporate one - inhibiting collaboration and breaking down lines of communication.

Excel was never meant to be a corporate database, but has become just that. One key problem is that data is stored repeatedly all around the organisation in different formats. Excel is also hardly the most secure of environments for highly confidential data!

How do you provide the power of Excel, without the Hell?

By centralising and workflow controlling data to manage your Excel data you can deliver the best of both worlds helping to ensure ‘one version of the truth’. By empowering your team, keeping Excel as the powerful calculation, modelling and user-interactivity tool, but moving the data storage element to a formally designed and managed database, your planning and analysis teams:

Get to use an environment they love – Excel;
Can manipulate, analyse and interrogate information with ease;
You reduce time collating data; and critically
Enable increased time analysing data.

At the same time you:

Gain instant access to the current ‘bigger picture’;
Maintain audit trail and data consistency for compliance; and
Empower your organisation to make decisions.

Solutions to these problems take many forms, from 'off the shelf' products from Microsoft themselves, to organisations like SAP, Oracle & Business Objects through to bespoke, custom-developed solutions or an appropriate mix of the two to deliver the exact needs of your business.

Budgeting, planning and forecasting accurately is critical to business success, doing it accurately can be a lot easier than many would have you believe!