Enterprise Information Management

Given high data volumes & their movements in BI and DWH space, ever wondered on where you will deply Cloud in BI?   I came up with some quick reference guide on the areas where we can apply Cloud.  Here are some examples (in the RCLL space):

External Data Analytics: Data from AC Nielson and IMS (medical POS data) is analysed by most of the organisations already, but mostly in silos at country level.  This way the metrics and other parameters they measure are usually country-specific, leaving very little information for sharing across countries.  Organisation-wide implementation of the external data analytics is gaining ground mainly in increasing the productivity, optimise costs and increase information sharing.  Since there is a lot of hesitation for org-wide adoption, cloud plays a very important role in providing scalable infrastructure.  Cloud also provides anywhere-access, thus making information sharing even more easy

1.       Pricing Analytics: Pricing analytics can be offered on SaaS model.  Retailers can easily avail these analytics by providing their pricing information to an externally hosted pricing engine.  This engine operates on data provided by many other retailers, and sourced by hosting agency.  This SaaS model helps in competitively pricing the products.  This works well because of 2 accounts, one reason is the application is less used and expensive.  The second reason is we need external pricing information from competitors, which is possible only on SaaS model

2.       Package booking & Delivery information: Logistic organisations can use Cloud packages successfully, to understand how many deliveries are being booked, and how many are delivered on time, without having to resort to use of expensive WAN.  If this data is available on Cloud, BI can be leveraged to understand the delivery bottlenecks and optimise the route planning etc.  Many other standard metrics can be calculated and circulated across functions and countries

3.       SFA on Cloud: Sales Force Automation is already available on Cloud.  Packaged analytics can provide appropriate feedback to Sales Force on field about their performance, so as to assist in making amends to their plans

4.       Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting applications: Many organisations still use rudimentary and time consuming applications or mere spread sheets to do this activity.  PBF on cloud can tremendously reduce the budgeting cycle times, improve their productivity, and reduce costs

5.       Secondary Sales information: CPG organisations can leverage Cloud to understand secondary sales from their distributors easily.  In addition to the sales, they can understand other information like inventory positions etc.  This helps to understand distribution & region performance

I will add more to the list later.  Please keep watching.

Posted by KN Rao at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

You must be aware that Cloud has been on the Top of CIOs Agenda these days.  Business Intelligence and Analytics were on the top 3 of CIOs Agenda till last year, but now they appear within Top 10.  If you separate them as infrastructure and applications, then BI and Analytics would still occupy the top slots. 

Business Intelligence always evolves at an organisation, hence is best described as a journey, rather than a reaching a destination.  The side effect for this evolution is that it accumulates lots of data over a period of time, and generates attention across the organisation.  Our experience shows that data accumulation has serious consequences on server scalability and slows down future developments.  Its popularity among the other functions across the organisation attracts more data usage and building extra data marts/ data pens etc.

The above paragraph discusses only the server volumes and the consequences of exploding data volumes.  Imagine the yearly license payments for the tools, version upgrades and migrations involved.  All these are going to cost a lot of money.  At times, some tools are used very rarely, but they are very important.  How to handle these situations without making exorbitant license payments?

Another dimension to this complex situation is the availability of the qualified, but scarce, BI & Analytics Consultants to work both on continuous and on-demand basis for the ever growing appetite on BI.  Sometimes, the organisations need highly qualified & expensive consultants for short spurts only.  Multi-national Corporations usually work on new developments in "develop-once, but deploy/ adopt-many" mode.  Adoption of these sorts of applications sometimes takes years.  So, investments made for global applications get under-utilised for many years. 

In the above paragraphs, we discussed about lack of server scalability, under-used expensive tool license payments, lack of qualified consultants & skills, under-utilisation of global program resources etc. 

Economic conditions demand that Retail & CPG Organisations need to constantly engage with their customers and generate interest to purchase products.  But at the same time, the organisations should be able to keep their costs low.  Cloud can redress all the above-mentioned issues.  One can start with a small hardware, and then expand it seamlessly as their needs increase.  Similarly, it allows re-sizing the development & testing environments, when required.  Rarely used expensive tools can be engaged on pay-per-use basis.  Expensive consultants can be moved to off-site and engaged on-demand basis.  Additional benefits offered will be the accompanying security, cheaper disaster recovery and backup facilities.  This also brings in anywhere access, rather than relying on organisation WAN.  Cloud BI and Analytics is most applicable in applications dealing with external data like from IMS, AC Nielson etc., where international trends can be studied, leveraging successful campaigns, and easy exchange of global information.  

Cloud may face some hosting challenges in the area of Data Privacy regulations.  However, these can be overcome with the help of data masking applications for offsite development. 

Posted by KN Rao at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)