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

Continue reading "Cloud BI Scenarios:" »

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

Continue reading "BI on Cloud" »

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

Understanding the organisation's information / reporting needs and categorisation of the same into Subject Areas / Information Areas gives a good start into MDM structuring.  Next we need to label the subject areas with respect to the organisation parameters like business units, geography, and the hierarchy of people it is supposed to service.  

Continue reading "Start up to MDM (3)....." »

Posted by KN Rao at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before we jump on to the MDM bandwagon on a full-scale, we need to actually take a step back and think.  If you look at the inners of any MDM application, what do we get to see?  We see data extractions, data integrations, transformations, cleansing, standardisation, and data loading...., right? Where do we see such stuff?  We see all these in the larger picture of Business Intelligence or Information Management.  So, MDM has to fit in the overall picture of Information Management or Business Intelligence.  All these BI or IM help in Decision Support for Business Users, right? So, why not look at it from the top down and bottom up approaches in terms of information requirements at various levels or across the organisation.  You will have information / decision making needs at various levels of the organisation like: Top management, Business Unit level, Analytical level, and Operational level.  I added Operational level included here, as BI / IM is becoming omnipresent in most of the organisations.  

Continue reading "Start up to MDM (2)..." »

Posted by KN Rao at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When an organisation takes up a Master Data Management exercise, we expect the whole organisation to adopt the new Master Data / Reference Data Codes.  How correct is this?  What happens to the part of the organisation which is still dealing with day-to-day operational activities & related challenges?  What happens to the part of the organisation that is still operating Mainframes and other legacy systems?  

Continue reading "Start up to MDM" »

Posted by KN Rao at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a continuation to the blogs dated 18^th and 22^nd Aug2011.  We talked about the business requirements in the first blog.  Then we talked about how we plan to address the Master data hierarchy requirements in the second blog.  In this blog, I am going to cover the most important aspect of the business that is margins / profit. 

Continue reading "BI & MDM in CPG Demand Forecasting (3). . . " »

Posted by KN Rao at 7:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the continuation of the blog on "BI & MDM in CPG Demand Forecasting "dated 18Aug2011.  I am going to address the problems we saw and the solutions we offered, one by one. 

Let me start with the multiple hierarchy requirements.  The SKUs are supposed to be rolled up as per the Product Group (main one: based on type of material), Brand (different names for different customers, regions), Sub Brand (based on grade of the material), Packaging size (based on the quantity packed), Business Unit (whether selling directly to big retailers, retail consumers etc.), Category (manufactured / bought), Recipe (to indicate main ingredients), and SKU Case (trollies, packs, SKU etc.).   A huge number of hierarchies as you can see....  These are the ones recognised so far.  There are many to be defined yet.  

Continue reading "BI & MDM in Demand Forecasting . . . . " »

Posted by KN Rao at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Demand Forecasting in CPG organisations is gaining more importance these days to forecast their customers' product off-take.  This is about one of our Retail CPG customer's decision to adopt a Demand Forecasting application to meet all their forecasting needs. 

This is about the same customer about whom I described earlier as:

Continue reading "BI & MDM in Demand Forecasting" »

Posted by KN Rao at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continuation of the blog published on 25 Feb'11.

Our search for solution / salvation continued. . . .

We once again looked at the Option 1.  This option is very much valid given a green field implementation.  This follows a classical DWH implementation, but the reconciliation mechanism will be like quids chasing pennies.  Then we looked around for the work that is already done, by going through our Minutes of Meetings and other customer supplied documents. 

We realised that the customer had already implemented Vendor Spend Analytics, Customer Web Analytics, Spare Parts Inventory Analytics and Profitability calculations using some old / proprietary technologies.   Repeating these in the Option 1 is not going to be helpful, other than consuming the precious budget.

Continue reading "Complex Retail Architecture . . .Our search continued" »

Posted by KN Rao at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"How can we help people make the right decisions - choose the right options in this constantly changing world?" Sounds like a noble dream... a philosophical question...A good case for a modern age Sidharta to leave the royal pleasures in search of the answer...Well, almost...Last week 500 technologists, business leaders, analysts and psychologists converged at the fringes of the Arizonian desert to reflect on the same question...sharing their experiences, observations, opportunities and insights

The event - Discover 2011 - the annual User Conference hosted by Endeca Technologies, Inc., a search and business intelligence (BI) company featured dozens of customer-led sessions, that deliberated on how the simplicity of Search combined with the power of BI can transform their organizations by enabling business users, partners and end users to make better decisions.

The sessions opened with a bang with Paul Sonderegger (Chief Strategist & Ex Principal Analyst at Forrester Research) who set the right context to the event...He painted a picture of

• A world that is getting more digitized every day
• "Abundance of choices" and the resulting "Scarcity of attention" faced by fellow human beings in this Digital world
• The importance of sifting through the ever growing, abundance of data and to "Guide" the users in their daily decisions

This was followed by and that too quite seamlessly by another insightful talk on "How we take decisions". Jonah Leher author of best seller "How we decide" took the audience into the realm of neuroscience to explain the complex events happening in our own 3 pound supercomputer - Brain - during our mundane day to day decisions, like picking up a box of cereal from the store shelf... How the cognitive centers and centers of emotions work together in guiding us to our choices...

Let me take a pause here...Shouldn't the "Information workbenches" mimic or facilitate this process? Every application that we build thus becomes an information exchange that will help users to experience predictability in their daily transactions.

On the same note, it was quite heartening to see a world that we visualized...a strategy that we charted out almost 4 years back, turn out into reality. This approach called for a fresh look at information management and attempted to perceive next gen information management as

An art of intelligently delivering the most "relevant" information to the user for that specific context

• An infrastructure that can
• Connect with the User,
• Sense the potential intentions
• Predict and Persuade the users to the desired outcomes
• A realm of complete user empowerment, where the users interactively discover their needs and choices

Interesting isn't it...Now the questions in front of us will be, "Will this impact the IT fabric of an organization?" or "Will this change that way we design and develop applications?" The short answer is "Yes"

• The locus of control will shift from Information to the User and User experience will have to be addressed and managed comprehensively
• Analytics and Digital Channels will converge - The technology domains, those were kept in administrative silos rather artificially will come together to address the need of the Digital User, whether it is an employee or a consumer
• Next Generation Information management initiatives will call for even closer functioning of Business and IT
• Explosion of customer touch points will mandate organizations to develop "Seamless and Consistent" Customer Experience Management as a core capability

Posted by Santhosh Adayikkoth at 5:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am giving an interesting anecdote here, based on my recent BI roadmap experience at a Hybrid Retail Organisation.   This organisation does a bit of process manufacturing, supplies products to retail customers, supermarkets, mom & pop corner shops and other high street coffee shops.  Retail customers can purchase their products either online or offline, based on their convenience.  They also resell lot of 3^rd party products.  It is quite an interesting portfolio of products and services from this organisation.  Based on the products they supply and the customers they service, it has been divided into multiple business units.  It is interesting to note that there is a common raw material / ingredients used in all of their products.

This organisation has dozens of depots to service far flung customers, many central warehouses to supply the depots, major customers, and also store low shelf life and high shelf life products. It also maintains a huge fleet of vehicles to help in raw material collection and FG distribution.

Continue reading "Complex Retail Architecture" »

Posted by KN Rao at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When an organization decides to implement Data Quality strategy, there are several design patterns that can be considered. The data quality goals should be the key driving factor in choosing the design factor.

Continue reading "Design considerations for a Data Quality Framework" »

Posted by A. Sankara Narayanan at 6:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The importance of defining and implementing a Data Quality strategy for an organization is well known. Here is an example - The U.S. Attorney General's office stated that approximately $23 billion is lost in fraud or inaccurate billing.[1]

It is necessary to define the different Data quality metrics that need to be measured and monitored. The amount of data being stored in the organizations is very huge. The business processes for capturing this data and transforming it to different forms for different purposes are also very large. It is practically very difficult to define and measure the data quality across all the data flows consistently and continuously.

What strategy would you use to prioritize the metrics?

Continue reading "Leverage customers' insights to drive Data Quality strategy" »

Posted by A. Sankara Narayanan at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This blog is in continuation to another blog on "Biz Analytics to drive Business Performance", published on 29Apr 2010. 

Recently, I had a long conversation with a CIO on his BI programme.  His organisation spans across 20+ countries.  Each country operates different applications, ERPs and source systems to manage their business.  London happens to be their HQ.  The discussion started with the BI plan on trying to automate timely production of Corporate Reports for the HQ.  The BI Plan is to start producing Sales Reports, followed by Financial Reports and later with Operations Reports in a phased manner.  Everything looked fine as far as these are concerned.  Architecture for the BI Programme resembled a centralised DWH, with lot of data movements from individual country to London.  Well, this looks like a huge BI programme with lots of data integration mechanism and data standardisation mechanisms to take care of integrated reporting and automating all those.

Continue reading "Is this BI or PM: New Argument...." »

Posted by KN Rao at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wealth Management in the Banking Sector is undergoing major facelift these days.  The golden era of eternal increase in investment values has passed.  Now it is the time to bring in prudence and caution in the activities.   

HNIs, Corporates and Trusts form the main clientele for Wealth Management Units in Banks.  Huge amounts of investments are made across swathes of products like Equity, Debentures, Mutual Funds, Futures, Art, Commodities, Fixed Deposits and ETFs.

Continue reading "Business Analytics in Wealth Management........" »

Posted by KN Rao at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CSPs are always observed to be in the fore-front of innovation and technology adoption.  This has been the case from the time Mobile Phones were invented.  World-wide we are observing Mobile Phone adoption at a frenzied pace.  New CSPs are allowed function in high growth economies, with greater regularity, in order to meet the growing demand, new technology adoption and prevent restrictive trade practices.  CSPs are also transforming themselves to provide more consumer services like: Mobile Phone, Cable Television, Fixed line Telephone, and Broadband. 

Most of the CSPs are also transforming themselves through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), aided by deregulation and macro economic conditions, in order to thrive and survive.

Continue reading "TELCO Merger Scenario: How BI can help? " »

Posted by KN Rao at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Retail Industry as we all know is a high volume low margin business.  I am talking about the Supermarket variety here.  This industry has to cope with loads of data, especially with POS data, constantly being revised product list (their SKUs), stock availability data, commercial data to calculate margins, customer acceptance data (for substitution products), customer services data (returns, complaints and refunds), new customer data, etc.

Timely information should be available for various departments like: Finance, Operations, Supply Chain, Marketing, Customer Services, Analytics, Commercial, and Business Development.  However, we all know that the information required for the above-mentioned departments will be different. 

Continue reading "Retail Analytics - An Intro" »

Posted by KN Rao at 6:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recession and Credit Crunch have separated the companies that are better prepared, and those who are not so prepared.  Organisations are beginning to take the BI usage to higher levels.  Well, some are adopting BI fast, if they haven't done so far.

Traditionally, BI is used for data management and reporting.  This only shows "how they are doing NOW!!!"  But it is often difficult to understand why they are doing so much only, unless we start comparing with what have they planned to achieve.  Performance Management (PM) comes to the rescue here.  PM establishes the various metrics, KPIs, Plans and Budgets through forecasting mechanisms etc., it becomes easy to measure the as-of-now performance.  Mature Organisations perform even better by devising plans / ways to improve their performance by a much higher degree.  They have started deploying Business Analytics combined with Statistical methods and Interactive Decision making utilities, coupled with business themes. 

Continue reading "Business Analytics to drive Business Performance" »

Posted by KN Rao at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Most of you must have already heard about the popular acronyms like CDI, MDM and DQ.  In case, you haven’t, they are Customer Data Integration (CDI), Master Data Management (MDM), and Data Quality (DQ). 

Continue reading "CDI, MDM, DQ: Points to Ponder....." »

Posted by KN Rao at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Advanced Analytics in Corporate Banking..." »

Posted by KN Rao at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

    Data is an asset for an organization. We have heard this data management principle multiple times. It has been clichéd to the core but most organizations fail to understand the true meaning of this principle. Let me try and explain this by using an analogy. Let us take an equally clichéd analogy of a car to look at this principle from a new perspective.

Continue reading "Data is an asset" »

Posted by Ajey Jayant Sudame at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

If your wife adds (if you are the lucky one) additional 1/2 tea spoon sugar in your bed tea, can you imagine what would be the impact on your blood sugar level and to maintain the ideal balance with calorie count how many extra steps you’ll be running. Mass penetration of internet and ever increasing health consciousness in society has ensured that everyone has easy access to appropriate diet charts and general health tips such as above are addressed to some extent. However, healthcare providers around the world who are facing the pressure of patients and healthcare authorities to improve quality care with no complications, seek an analytical solution to empower them with robust tool to analyze data and regularly identify patients at risk.

Continue reading "Analyzing Analytics" »

Posted by Piyush Kumar at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

You can notice Information Management (IM) space is quite hot these days.  There are multiple tools coming into the market to put the power of knowledge in the hands of business users.  These are also coming to the aid of IT Teams, in reducing their workloads, and enabling them to focus more on the data and information governance aspects.  But quite often we lose track of the important principles that we need to follow.  Albeit these are not quite difficult to follow, but are essential. 

Continue reading "Information Management Roadmap guidelines" »

Posted by KN Rao at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Advanced Analytics: An Intro" »

Posted by KN Rao at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Credit Crunch BI" »

Posted by KN Rao at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Information Access" »

Posted by KN Rao at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Vendor Spend Analytics" »

Posted by KN Rao at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "TOWARDS A SUCCESSFUL BI IMPLEMENTATION" »

Posted by Guest Author at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "TOWARDS A SUCCESSFUL BI IMPLEMENTATION" »

Posted by Guest Author at 6:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fast Turtle?
For over a long period of time, the IT industry mastered the art of creating and storing information on computers. What was spectacular was the lack of interest in the building the ability to retrieve this information even quickly. The results were well known. A software engineering stream called data warehousing which purely focused on retrieving the information out of the data and providing intelligence to the business.

Funnily, for all the years we spent all the time and energy building fast commercial computers and structuring data bases to make them more powerful to accept and store the information. More funnily, we then spent a huge time, energy and money building tools to retrieve that information over the same building blocks. This was surely the Fast Turtle of the IT Industry. It took quite a while for the industry to realize that Fast Turtle is an oxymoron and not reality and that it has already happened to DWH.

What about Teradata then?

Although a relative late entry in IT evolution, Teradata did set the rules for BI appliance computing. Teradata brought in step changes in the way DWH computing was done. It did tame the Fast Turtle. But only to create a White Elephant. Way out of reach of commoners, only the fortune 500 aristocrats could afford it.

The “Time” of Business Intelligence

Inspired by the Teradata success story and sensing an opportunity for a “poor man’s Teradata’, lot of organization dreamt of and created appliances. Netezza brought in a few super computer designers from the US department of defence and created this beautiful appliance which you can stick in your golf cart and take it to office. White Cross, a quintessential British company woke up from 20 year slumber, acquired Kognitio, renamed itself as Kognitio and jumped in the market. Datalegro was not far behind, making itself eligible in the acquisition market. The biggies are now also in. IBM with its Balanced Warehouse (thought it still uses indexes and I would hesitate to brand it as a ‘pure play’ appliance), HP NeoView (Have you got silver streaks in your stubble, or hair to be more politically correct, to remember Tandem) and Oracle (don’t know what they are doing). A sigh of relief over the follies and the quick correction.

Wondering what is the fasted thing in the universe? Yes it is Time indeed. Are appliances the “Time” of Business Intelligence? Only time will tell

Posted by Rajesh Shashikant Naik at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

You must be surprised to see something like this in the Blog.  Well, we must have grown up thinking that Data Marts are the cure for all the ills plaguing the Big BI / DWs in the first place.  I am not ruling out that thinking completely, but just want to bring in some more focus towards the existence and continuation of Data Marts.

We all know that data is the lifeline of BI / DW.  In case of huge BI / DW installations, rummaging through data gets difficult, hence the concept of data marts was born.  Traditionally, Data Marts provide proper availability and accessibility to the concerned users.  Sometimes the departmental users also use analytics with the help of sandboxes.  We need to keep in mind while devising the data marts, because the data marts have every potential to turn into data management challenges, if they are not monitored properly.  The IT department has to do proper management of the same, and not letting them out of control in the hands of business users.

Continue reading "BI Data Marts are like Icebergs in Ocean" »

Posted by KN Rao at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I am sure all of you must have come across the words Proof of Concept, and Prototyping, in BI context.  You would have come across them quite early in a BI / DW Project, where the customer is testing technology waters, and how their business users would react.  We all know that, this kind of stuff engages business users early on.

All of us have seen that a usual problem in BI / DW development is the disconnect between what the business users need and what the IT delivers.  It is difficult to find fault with either of the teams, because Business users find it difficult to express or articulate their requirements, specially the look and feel of their needs, definition of their metrics, what kind of analyses they would like to have handy.

Continue reading "How PoCs are helpful for well-accepted solutions" »

Posted by KN Rao at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In this article I am covering Retail Supermarket Industry's BI requirements.  These days, it is very common for this industry to offer Online Sales and Brick & Mortar Sales outlets. This is a high transaction volume with low margin industry.

This Industry has to put up with loads of data volumes, specially with the checkout basket data, constantly being revised products and their SKUs, stock availability data, commercial data to calculate margins, delivery van slot availability, product substitution data, customer acceptance data, customer services data, new customer master data etc.

Continue reading "Agile BI in Retail Industry" »

Posted by KN Rao at 5:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many architects still believe that BI/DW and SOA are divergent Architectural paradigms and SOA is not applicable to BI. Some of the key reasons are

1.       BI requires detailed understanding of the data for adhoc analysis while SOA encapsulates data behind the service interface.

2.       BI requires high volume data being handled in batch mode while SOA serves a specific transaction which is well defined and data volume is low.

Continue reading "BI and SOA – Where is the conflict?" »

Posted by Jayanta Adhikary at 7:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We all know by now that, EPM helps an Organization in efficiently using their business units, financial, human and material resources and thereby optimising business performance. It helps in bringing together all types of data / information, including both financial and operational information. Well, this data integration portion is contributed by BI. 

Businesses are run as per the metrics / performance metrics defined. Some of these metrics could be Qualitative and some Quantitative in nature. Qualitative ones capture the facets, which cannot be quantified, such as, Quality of Management, Efficiency of Employees and Confidence of Shareholders, and they are critical for the business continuity.  Quantitative measures mostly provide an objective performance measurement. 

I believe EPM covers important processes such as planning, forecasting, consolidation, where the foundation is laid through data integration from various sources, querying, analysis of the data. The underlying foundation is the handiwork of BI.

Continue reading "BI – EPM market consolidation and the way forward" »

Posted by KN Rao at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• To take profitable business decisions based on numbers
  
• Get an Enterprise wise performance view starting from Strategic to operational goals
  
• Create linkage of every business actions to Strategic business goals
  

BI has evolved over time to meet growing decision-making needs of businesses. It has definitely evolved from being a basic MIS Reporting tool, to being an intelligent platform that works as a decision support system.

I would like to offer a simple definition for BI, as a data collection, data processing, information / intelligence delivery platform for all the decision-makers to gain insight and act effectively

Continue reading "BI Strategy thinking for a Bigger play" »

Posted by KN Rao at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)