Enterprise Information Management

There are times when a company wants to change the way they are working in order to bring in efficiencies at different levels. This change has become mandatory to them because their current processes or systems are not able to help them meet their strategic goals and therefore making a negative impact on their overall performance. In such cases the company management decides to change systems that they think are causing the bottleneck and embarks on a mission that will remove the bottlenecks or implement a new system that will help them perform certain functions better and faster. Such initiatives can help them meet their immediate goal or solve the problem they are facing. In the long term these bottlenecks will start surfacing again in different forms. Even well thought long term solutions need to be revamped and modified periodically but the cost of doing this will be much lesser because this will be done less frequently and changes can be controlled. Therefore, it is very critical for a company to know if the decision they are making about implementing a new project is right or not.

To save companies from getting into a situation where there is chaos in the projects they initiate, they run into cost and effort overrun because of unknowns surfacing every now and then, there is no clarify in the next step that has to be taken, the recommended approach is an initial discovery phase. The discovery phase will help the company in taking a step back, analyze the current situation and pain points and come up with possible solutions to overcome the challenges that are facing. A discovery phase is suggested for every project if the company is not very sure of the details of the project. If the company who is outsourcing the project knows (1) the requirements that the project should meet (2) the problems that the project should overcome (3) possible approaches that can be taken to solve the problem then the discovery phase may be avoided. But this is not true in most cases. Companies outsourcing projects normally does not know (1) the detail requirements of the project (2) possible solution options or approaches (3) how the solution is going to help them and what kind of benefits its going to bring (4) the impact a good solution will have in its ROI (4) if that is the right project for them to do now.

It is very important for a company to understand whether the decision they are making about a implementing a new system or changing some existing ones is right or not. In such cases, it is recommended for any company to invite a vendor to do an initial discovery. The company can themselves do the discovery if they have the right resources. A typical discovery phase may have the following activities:

1.      Workshops with the company stakeholders to understand the problems they are facing. To get maximum benefits from the workshop it’s essential to have all the stakeholders involved completely in this workshop for a few days.

2.      Come up with possible solutions for the problems and have discussions on the same with the stakeholders from the company

3.      Discuss the benefits and disadvantages of each solution or approach and point out the recommended approach

4.      Help the company to understand the ROI from the initiative or project

5.      Come up with cost, effort and schedule plan for the implementing the identified approach or solution

The above mentioned 5 steps will, at least, help companies take up the implementation phase with more confidence and will help in gaining the support from the company senior management. The business model of a discovery can depend on the company and the vendor doing the discovery. In some cases it can be offered for free based on conditions and in other cases it can be charged based on a pricing model. But, apart from the activities discussed above, such a phase will also give an opportunity for the company to evaluate the vendor on various aspects like project management, communication, customer awareness, technical depth, execution ability, process etc. This also increases the comfort level the customer has for the vendor and brings in a degree of trust and confidence in the vendor. So, I think, the discovery phase is a phase which will benefit the vendor and the company and should be followed in almost all cases.

Today, because of recession, cost cutting measures, increased pressure to drive initiatives that will help in bring down cost companies discourage a discovery. Another reason for rejecting a discovery phase is the misunderstanding of knowing that this phase will not bring in any tangible benefits to the organization. Sometimes, the vendor is not able to depict the real advantage of a discovery phase to the company or did not execute the previous discovery it in a way that brought benefits to the company. I think this is the most important phase before any project execution and the vendor should bring in its best resources to do this phase. Also, the company should bring in required stakeholders from the departments involved and ensure that there is commitment from them and everyone is aware and working together with the vendor for a successful discovery.

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Part 2: What companies should do to extract maximum benefits from their BI implementation?

A BI system implementation should aim at getting an accurate picture of the current performance of the enterprise. The BI system should be capable of responding to changes in the market. It should be able to integrate financial consolidation with the operational performance. Basically, a BI system should be able to guide the enterprise in the right direction after deriving insights from the current data that is fed into the system.

1.       The company should know why they need a BI system and the expectations from the same. For e.g. the goal can be centralization of key business process or getting a 360 degree view of the global customer base.

2.       The company should ensure that the senior management and the other essential stakeholders across processes are involved in the decision making and understand the goal. All the stakeholders should be on the same page and should be committed to working towards the mission of taking the BI system implementation successfully towards it goal. All the stakeholders should be given the BI training specially designed for the stakeholders. Without this a company can be sure that it will never reach its goal set to be achieved through the BI implementation.

3.       Hire a BI consultant with proper knowledge of the domain. This consultant will study the current landscape of the systems and advice an approach that will help the company reach its goal. The initial study done by the consultant should be able to generate the following output:

a.       Conduct a cause and effect analysis to develop business process models to evaluate the decision alternatives and identify the KPIs that will meet the business needs

b.       Draw the requirements of the BI system that is aligned with the goals of the implementation. The BI consultant should come up with the requirements of the system after discussions with the stakeholders and understanding the goal.

c.       A conceptual view of the various sources, single version of truth (data warehouse) and the final BI system

         i.      Clear understanding of the ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ model

d.       The BI product that will fit the needs of the organization

e.       A roadmap showing the implementation path to reach the final goal. If the sources are high in number the company can adopt a phased approach. The roadmap should be able to depict the evolution of a full fledged BI system that will touch upon almost every area of the business to achieve the final goal.

f.        The requirements can be floated as an RFP or given to the preferred Systems Integrator for the implementation.

          i.      Choosing the right System Integrator or vendor should be one of the tasks for the BI consultant. The right vendor choice will go a very ling way in determining the success of the BI implementation and whether the implementation will help the company in meeting the goals.

The success of any BI implementation will depend on having the BI consultant work with the Systems Integrator till the implementation is over. The stakeholders from the company along with the BI consultant should work closely with the vendor to ensure that the BI application functionality is rightly aligned to the business goals. The stakeholders should also have a very good understanding of the ROI that can be generated out of this initiative and this should be revisited and checked regularly. Last but not the least the whole program should have a clear governance structure defined in place that will ensure proper planning, risks and their mitigation, definition of roles and responsibilities and overall management of the program.

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Part 1: Why companies fail to extract maximum benefits from their BI implementation?

When companies grow they need systems that will streamline and optimize operation performance, help them in making better decision based on data and trends and come up with strategies that are in line with the business goals of the organization. This is possible through Business Intelligence. In an effort to implement a BI system, companies either plan to (1) have a team that will be dedicated to write the software, (2) outsource the job of developing the systems to a vendor or (3) implement a product that will meet the BI requirements. Option (3) is, in most cases, better than option (1) and (2) because it can be implemented faster and in most cases will cost lesser. The most important factors of a BI implementation is to know and understand why BI is required, the goals that should be met, the strategies that will help in meeting the goals and product that will fit the immediate and the long term needs of the organization. Reports say that companies, over a period of time have purchased and implemented different BI products under different leaderships. CIOs come and go and they leave their mark in the company in terms of a product implementation or changes to the software environment based on what they feel are the best. This drains out the resources of the company and never gets them what they really want. In this article, I will try to focus on how a company can take the right steps to successfully implement a BI system that will meet the strategic business goals of the company.

Most of the companies get all their reporting needs by having someone write SQL queries against the database and export the reports to excel. When their business and database grow, their current systems fail to meet all their reporting needs. Some reports become very complex to be generated. Some might take a very long time to get generated. In such cases, companies typically give the responsibility of implementing a BI system to one of the IT managers who would then consult a BI product company or a System Integrator for advice and implementation. During the engagement, a BI product is identified (not using scientific means, but in most cases driven by budget availability) and implemented to take care of their operational and other reporting needs. The advantage is that this approach will meet the short term goals and possibly improve report generation speed and also make the generation of a few complex reports possible. But the disadvantage is that this approach (1) will not meet the long term needs (2) will not, in most cases, have full support from the management and the users because they don’t understand the benefits or none are consulted, (3) will be used mostly as a reporting system without taking the full advantage of BI features and (4) since the IT managers have minimal business knowledge the final system fail to deliver the expected business benefits.

In the next post, we will discuss what companies should do to extract maximum benefits from their BI implementation.

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I have heard many times from clients that they want to use a horizontal portal framework for the external facing web but are worried about the performance/scalability and maturity of the technology. Most of the Internet generation has seen portal frameworks perform on the intranets, some small user base external portals but we have not seen many large  implementations being done using the Horizontal Portal frameworks. The Amazon’s, Yahoo’s, Google’s, Facebook’s of the worlds are using proprietary frameworks. Some of these heavy weights have started using current generation technologies like J2EE, Flash/Flex/Ajax but none of these are even thinking of using a COTS Horizontal Portal products.  Many online retailers today are making use of the COTS e-commerce Packages (I call them Vertical Portal Solutions). So in some sense COTS has been successfully implemented for large e-commerce based implementations. But e-Commerce packages were built for the external facing requirements where as the success and deployments of the COTS horizontal portal framework have primarily come from internal solutions.

Posted by Rushikesh R. Ubgade at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)