Our (so far) modest BI undertakings at Westminster have very much been joint efforts between IT and everyone else. I’ve helped to define the overall project while individual departments have partnered with an IT person to implement what they need. I have personally handled some of the dashboard development as well, but again, this is in partnership with others. As the CIO, I do have a very good understanding of what key performance indicators are considered by our president to be critical information, and I’ve worked with the departments responsible for the work that generates those metrics to make sure that the information we’re pulling is accurate and current. Before we put a new metric onto an “official” dashboard, we vet that data carefully. Nothing is worse than making decisions based on bad data!
Here are four keys to success that I feel must be in place for BI to succeed:
* The organization needs to make BI a well-known and resourced priority.
* While the CIO has (and probably should have) primary responsibility for these kinds of efforts, the CIO is far from alone in determining overall initiative success. An understanding by all involved that BI is not an “IT project” but is, instead, a “business project” is essential.
* Business unit leaders must be willing to work with the CIO to make sure their areas are well-represented and those leaders - or someone in their area - must have the expertise necessary to understand their data and extrapolate appropriate metrics.
* The organization must be willing to appropriately react based on the information gleaned from the BI system. If, for example, data begins to clearly point to a drying up of the market, the organization needs to be willing to not stick its head in the sand. If this is the reaction, why use BI at all?
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Pay as You Go: SaaS Business Intelligence and Data Management
It seems you can’t pick up an IT magazine, read a technical or business blog or attend a business intelligence (BI) conference without hearing about software as a service (SaaS) and the new model of software delivery. SaaS was used initially by small to medium businesses, but it is now being adopted more and more by large multinational corporations. Today we have a plethora of examples of SaaS companies serving all sizes of businesses. Each has focused on helping their subscribers transform the way they do business, changing the way they bought or sold items, and giving them alternatives to standard in-house IT environments.
We define SaaS as:
“A software delivery model where a vendor hosts, operates and manages a software service for use by its clients on a paid subscription basis. SaaS can be used to support operational, BI and collaborative processing for use over the Internet or, in some cases, an extranet.”
This article is an excerpt from our research paper on SaaS business intelligence entitled “Pay as You Go: SaaS Business Intelligence and Data Management.” This research was sponsored by five vendors who provide SaaS BI and data management solutions. Following are short synopses of the case studies. Longer, more detailed versions can be found in the full report that will be available later this month on the BeyeNETWORK's research site, BeyeRESEARCH.
eSupply Systems (Solution provided by Blink Logic)
In today’s economy, more and more people are renting their homes rather than buying them, and turnover can be high. When an apartment becomes available, property management companies must respond quickly and cost-effectively to make the rental property suitable for the next tenant. In addition, these companies must clean the hallways, gardens, pools and other general areas on an ongoing basis. Indeed MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) activities comprise a multibillion dollar industry.
Unfortunately, this process can be fraught with miscalculated charges for supplies and services. Additionally, it is often difficult to appropriately allocate the costs of the maintenance for a particular apartment if more than one is being prepared for re-rental. Helping these companies determine whether a property’s maintenance is being performed appropriately is the mission of eSupply Systems.
eSupply Systems provides web-based maintenance supply chain support through a cost-effective ecommerce platform using a SaaS-based BI offering from Blink Logic to give property managers actionable information on their maintenance activities. The analytical system provides large residential management companies the ability to:
* Analyze their overall spending
* Compare property-to-property expenses to better understand where efficiencies could be made
* Find out who was spending too much or too little
* Determine trends of spending by particular geographic areas
* Estimate what the costs should be for a prospective property
eSupply Systems has certainly seen great value in their SaaS-based MRO offering and specifically the analytics and reporting provided by Blink Logic’s BI solution. Not only did it take minimal effort and time, but also the easy and accessible nature of the web-based application is very appealing to their less technologically savvy property management customers.
Red Roof Inns (Solution provided by Host Analytics)
In 1973, Red Roof opened its first inn in the company’s headquarters of Columbus, Ohio. Over the years, the company has grown significantly to 345 hotels in 39 states serving millions of guests each year. Throughout its growth, the management team has remained focused on ensuring the company’s leadership position in its market. That focus has accelerated in the current economic downturn.
In September 2007, Red Roof began the process of separating from its former parent organization, Accor North America. A budgeting application was needed by each business unit in the company; but, unfortunately, one was not included in the transfer of technology. This did not stop the need for budgets to be developed for 2009. This meant that the corporate office had to come up with its own from scratch and in a very short amount of time – without IT help! It fell to the finance department to create the budgeting application in only a matter of a few months. They turned toHost Analytics and its SaaS corporate performance management (CPM) solution.
Data is loaded monthly into the CPM system from an Oracle financial system, the company’s budgets and forecasts are then updated, and the results sent back to the Oracle system. Significant validation and restructuring of the original parent company data was required, and the support and help from Host Analytics was invaluable.
There were several advantages that contributed to the success of the solution:
* Business users found the MS Excel-like interface easy to use and quick to learn
* Host Analytics’ CPM solution comes with prebuilt solution templates
* Red Roof employees can also create their own specialized templates
* The ability to quickly estimate every expense and revenue for every property
* Host Analytics resources met every deadline and made customizations quickly at no additional costs
Red Roof’s financial department has managed to implement a sophisticated budgeting solution quickly and efficiently by choosing the Host Analytics SaaS offering. Ease of use, flexibility, no maintenance or upgrade activities, Excel-like capabilities via a web-based interface and a customer-focused vendor are just a few of the characteristics that made for a successful project and happy customer.
Segmetrix (Solution provided by Kognitio)
Segmetrix is a business consultancy that turns complex data into true intelligence through their product, Match2Lists. The company provides an integrated analytical, data management and planning solution that gives its customers (large corporations in the business-to-business [B2B] space) a real competitive advantage. Its solutions capture large volumes of customer and financial data, available from both internal and external sources, and transforms it through sophisticated algorithms into execution-ready information. Segmetrix clients then use this information to improve their B2B sales, marketing and financial operations.
Segmetrix’ strategists and technical personnel also perform their own analytics on the data to improve the financial results and marketing behaviors of their clients. They help customers apply and utilize business intelligence in their business context rather than simply implementing the BI environment for the clients and leaving. Segmetrix’ expertise in best practices and data-driven execution helps clients to develop, implement and monitor integrated sales and marketing strategies.
Segmetrix turned to Kognitio to provide an integrated analytical, data management and planning data warehouse as a service (DaaS) infrastructure using WX2 RDBMS to store integrated, easily accessible data. The data is trickle fed into the data warehouse in mini-batches, thus providing low latency data for analyses. Now their clients receive the data, visual analytics, insights, and strategic and execution plans. These clients can determine:
* How well they are performing within the context of their markets
* Potential opportunities available to them
* Where and when they need to spend resources for marketing and sales activities
* Companies they should acquire
* Customers they should up-sell and with what products
* Marketing campaigns that are working and sales structures that have missed their targets
* Compensation plans that have worked
Segmetrix has learned that by using Kognitio’s DaaS solution it is free to focus on its true core competency: providing sophisticated analytics, insights and guidance to its B2B clients. Having a predictable environment that is easy to use, is cost-effective, returns results rapidly and is simple to scale up or down means it has a significant competitive advantage over other consultancies offering similar solutions through more traditional means.
Distribution Market Advantage (Solution provided by PivotLink)
How do hospitals, schools, and large restaurant and hotel chains get food service items to their individual facilities in a timely manner? Usually it is done through a sophisticated network of distributors like Distribution Market Advantage, Inc. (DMA). DMA is a national food service distribution company that delivers supply chain solutions for well-known multiunit restaurant and institutional customers. The company is a cooperative whose owners consist of several regional distributors. DMA needed a system to streamline the process of getting products from the manufacturers to its distributor facilities and, ultimately, to its customers’ locations.
DMA’s technology platform, e-Advantage provides food service operators with industry-leading order entry, data analytics, inventory visibility and price verification tools. The company needed to add a BI capability to the e-Advantage system to improve reporting to its clients. They had significant supply chain management expertise, but limited knowledge of business intelligence so they selected PivotLink’s SaaS BI system to complement their data warehouse (built by another SaaS vendor). PivotLink provided a pure-web based solution (with no plug-ins or downloaded controls) that could be branded with DMA’s own logos
Now, DMA’s clients can access data from the low-level transaction detail to high-level aggregates. The application supplies reports that are universally utilized by everyone, but each customer also has the ability to develop their own customized reports. Through the solution, they can:
* Change fields to fit their vocabulary
* Create aggregated reports
* Add new parameters
* Create specific customer folders to house these customized reports
PivotLink satisfies the more technical users as well by offering complex features that allow them to perform complicated analytics. Within PivotLink, DMA sets up customized reports to be automatically delivered via email in a variety of output formats specifically for users who might be intimidated by the application.
Like any business with low margins, the ability to control costs is critical. DMA has managed this by giving its distributors and customers invaluable insight into overall supply chain management. The tangible and intangible benefits from these insights have been significant and have increased everyone’s satisfaction with DMA.
RapidAdvance (Solution provided by SAP BusinessObjects)
In today’s economic crunch, staying in business means you must have access to money; but with credit getting tighter, many companies are finding the availability of cash scarce. Where can they get money to buy new inventory, invest in new equipment, bolster them for a seasonal trend, pay off a short-term debt, deal with emergency funding or any of myriad other cash needs?
Enter RapidAdvance. The company provides business capital in the form of an unsecured cash advance for any business need, allowing its customers to expand their businesses. The company operates as a specialty finance business for small to mid-sized businesses that use credit cards in their business. Their customers simply pay the cash advance back through a percentage of their future credit card sales.
Due to the nature of their cash advance requirements, RapidAdvance must understand its customers in a timely manner to determine which companies are suitable for these advances. Unfortunately they had silos of information, data quality concerns and limited analytical information through the usage of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and manual reporting. RapidAdvance needed to create a scalable and automated reporting solution in seven weeks but with limited IT resources. To do this, they chose SAP BusinessObjects crystalreports.com SaaS solution that was used in conjunction with RapidAdvance’s existing Salesforce.com SaaS deployment.
The implementation team (only three people) was able to immediately recreate dozens of the manually maintained reports in the crystalreports.com application without the assistance of additional staff or IT support. Everything was pushed to the web for access; and once a report was created, it was automated and distributed to the appropriate employees.
The team has expanded upon this beginning with substantially more reports, an enhanced layer of security, the addition of more internal and external users, the creation of more complex analyses and all of the company’s deal pricing models. RapidAdvance now has close to 1,000 reports used both internally or externally. All reports are automatically delivered via the web to employees, partners, etc. And these are still being produced and maintained by the original small team.
RapidAdvance has leveraged these reports to improve its overall business by:
* Reporting on deal and underwriting statuses to its external partners
* Providing commission reporting
* Analyzing portfolios
* Generating internal management reports for in-house usage
* Generating account status and risk levels
* Creating virtual due diligence reports for investors to review on site
RapidAdvance has implemented a sophisticated reporting and analytical environment for its executives, employees and partners. The short implementation time, cost-effective nature of SaaS solutions, flexibility in the creation of reports and analytics, and crystalreports.com’s ability to expand as the company does were decisive to the overall success of this solution. With crystalreports.com in place, RapidAdvance can now focus on running a profitable and growing business.
Summary
The case studies gave us great insight into the need for and benefits from SaaS implementations in the business intelligence area. We discovered two predominant uses for SaaS: business-specific BI applications focusing at present on customer-facing solutions and larger scale data warehousing and BI projects.
We also gathered fascinating information from a survey we ran. From it, we found that nearly 60% of the respondents were either already using or planning to use SaaS BI and data management solutions. They cited the low cost of the solutions and their faster implementation times as the top two reasons for choosing these solutions. Almost as popular was the business focus, not IT focus, of these solutions and their easy maintenance. Our survey uncovered concerns about SaaS implementations as well with the need to understand the SaaS approach, integration with existing IT systems and security concerns leading the way.
Finally, from our case studies as well as from the SaaS vendors themselves, we discovered significant information regarding the relationship and level of involvement between the two parties. It is important for SaaS customers to remain involved with the future of the SaaS company in terms of giving direction to the technological road map, providing input into trouble areas, and demonstrating new ways for using the application’s features and functions. In return, the vendors should supply their customers with input into the technological directions of the company as well – that is to their benefit as much as it is to their customers.
We define SaaS as:
“A software delivery model where a vendor hosts, operates and manages a software service for use by its clients on a paid subscription basis. SaaS can be used to support operational, BI and collaborative processing for use over the Internet or, in some cases, an extranet.”
This article is an excerpt from our research paper on SaaS business intelligence entitled “Pay as You Go: SaaS Business Intelligence and Data Management.” This research was sponsored by five vendors who provide SaaS BI and data management solutions. Following are short synopses of the case studies. Longer, more detailed versions can be found in the full report that will be available later this month on the BeyeNETWORK's research site, BeyeRESEARCH.
eSupply Systems (Solution provided by Blink Logic)
In today’s economy, more and more people are renting their homes rather than buying them, and turnover can be high. When an apartment becomes available, property management companies must respond quickly and cost-effectively to make the rental property suitable for the next tenant. In addition, these companies must clean the hallways, gardens, pools and other general areas on an ongoing basis. Indeed MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) activities comprise a multibillion dollar industry.
Unfortunately, this process can be fraught with miscalculated charges for supplies and services. Additionally, it is often difficult to appropriately allocate the costs of the maintenance for a particular apartment if more than one is being prepared for re-rental. Helping these companies determine whether a property’s maintenance is being performed appropriately is the mission of eSupply Systems.
eSupply Systems provides web-based maintenance supply chain support through a cost-effective ecommerce platform using a SaaS-based BI offering from Blink Logic to give property managers actionable information on their maintenance activities. The analytical system provides large residential management companies the ability to:
* Analyze their overall spending
* Compare property-to-property expenses to better understand where efficiencies could be made
* Find out who was spending too much or too little
* Determine trends of spending by particular geographic areas
* Estimate what the costs should be for a prospective property
eSupply Systems has certainly seen great value in their SaaS-based MRO offering and specifically the analytics and reporting provided by Blink Logic’s BI solution. Not only did it take minimal effort and time, but also the easy and accessible nature of the web-based application is very appealing to their less technologically savvy property management customers.
Red Roof Inns (Solution provided by Host Analytics)
In 1973, Red Roof opened its first inn in the company’s headquarters of Columbus, Ohio. Over the years, the company has grown significantly to 345 hotels in 39 states serving millions of guests each year. Throughout its growth, the management team has remained focused on ensuring the company’s leadership position in its market. That focus has accelerated in the current economic downturn.
In September 2007, Red Roof began the process of separating from its former parent organization, Accor North America. A budgeting application was needed by each business unit in the company; but, unfortunately, one was not included in the transfer of technology. This did not stop the need for budgets to be developed for 2009. This meant that the corporate office had to come up with its own from scratch and in a very short amount of time – without IT help! It fell to the finance department to create the budgeting application in only a matter of a few months. They turned toHost Analytics and its SaaS corporate performance management (CPM) solution.
Data is loaded monthly into the CPM system from an Oracle financial system, the company’s budgets and forecasts are then updated, and the results sent back to the Oracle system. Significant validation and restructuring of the original parent company data was required, and the support and help from Host Analytics was invaluable.
There were several advantages that contributed to the success of the solution:
* Business users found the MS Excel-like interface easy to use and quick to learn
* Host Analytics’ CPM solution comes with prebuilt solution templates
* Red Roof employees can also create their own specialized templates
* The ability to quickly estimate every expense and revenue for every property
* Host Analytics resources met every deadline and made customizations quickly at no additional costs
Red Roof’s financial department has managed to implement a sophisticated budgeting solution quickly and efficiently by choosing the Host Analytics SaaS offering. Ease of use, flexibility, no maintenance or upgrade activities, Excel-like capabilities via a web-based interface and a customer-focused vendor are just a few of the characteristics that made for a successful project and happy customer.
Segmetrix (Solution provided by Kognitio)
Segmetrix is a business consultancy that turns complex data into true intelligence through their product, Match2Lists. The company provides an integrated analytical, data management and planning solution that gives its customers (large corporations in the business-to-business [B2B] space) a real competitive advantage. Its solutions capture large volumes of customer and financial data, available from both internal and external sources, and transforms it through sophisticated algorithms into execution-ready information. Segmetrix clients then use this information to improve their B2B sales, marketing and financial operations.
Segmetrix’ strategists and technical personnel also perform their own analytics on the data to improve the financial results and marketing behaviors of their clients. They help customers apply and utilize business intelligence in their business context rather than simply implementing the BI environment for the clients and leaving. Segmetrix’ expertise in best practices and data-driven execution helps clients to develop, implement and monitor integrated sales and marketing strategies.
Segmetrix turned to Kognitio to provide an integrated analytical, data management and planning data warehouse as a service (DaaS) infrastructure using WX2 RDBMS to store integrated, easily accessible data. The data is trickle fed into the data warehouse in mini-batches, thus providing low latency data for analyses. Now their clients receive the data, visual analytics, insights, and strategic and execution plans. These clients can determine:
* How well they are performing within the context of their markets
* Potential opportunities available to them
* Where and when they need to spend resources for marketing and sales activities
* Companies they should acquire
* Customers they should up-sell and with what products
* Marketing campaigns that are working and sales structures that have missed their targets
* Compensation plans that have worked
Segmetrix has learned that by using Kognitio’s DaaS solution it is free to focus on its true core competency: providing sophisticated analytics, insights and guidance to its B2B clients. Having a predictable environment that is easy to use, is cost-effective, returns results rapidly and is simple to scale up or down means it has a significant competitive advantage over other consultancies offering similar solutions through more traditional means.
Distribution Market Advantage (Solution provided by PivotLink)
How do hospitals, schools, and large restaurant and hotel chains get food service items to their individual facilities in a timely manner? Usually it is done through a sophisticated network of distributors like Distribution Market Advantage, Inc. (DMA). DMA is a national food service distribution company that delivers supply chain solutions for well-known multiunit restaurant and institutional customers. The company is a cooperative whose owners consist of several regional distributors. DMA needed a system to streamline the process of getting products from the manufacturers to its distributor facilities and, ultimately, to its customers’ locations.
DMA’s technology platform, e-Advantage provides food service operators with industry-leading order entry, data analytics, inventory visibility and price verification tools. The company needed to add a BI capability to the e-Advantage system to improve reporting to its clients. They had significant supply chain management expertise, but limited knowledge of business intelligence so they selected PivotLink’s SaaS BI system to complement their data warehouse (built by another SaaS vendor). PivotLink provided a pure-web based solution (with no plug-ins or downloaded controls) that could be branded with DMA’s own logos
Now, DMA’s clients can access data from the low-level transaction detail to high-level aggregates. The application supplies reports that are universally utilized by everyone, but each customer also has the ability to develop their own customized reports. Through the solution, they can:
* Change fields to fit their vocabulary
* Create aggregated reports
* Add new parameters
* Create specific customer folders to house these customized reports
PivotLink satisfies the more technical users as well by offering complex features that allow them to perform complicated analytics. Within PivotLink, DMA sets up customized reports to be automatically delivered via email in a variety of output formats specifically for users who might be intimidated by the application.
Like any business with low margins, the ability to control costs is critical. DMA has managed this by giving its distributors and customers invaluable insight into overall supply chain management. The tangible and intangible benefits from these insights have been significant and have increased everyone’s satisfaction with DMA.
RapidAdvance (Solution provided by SAP BusinessObjects)
In today’s economic crunch, staying in business means you must have access to money; but with credit getting tighter, many companies are finding the availability of cash scarce. Where can they get money to buy new inventory, invest in new equipment, bolster them for a seasonal trend, pay off a short-term debt, deal with emergency funding or any of myriad other cash needs?
Enter RapidAdvance. The company provides business capital in the form of an unsecured cash advance for any business need, allowing its customers to expand their businesses. The company operates as a specialty finance business for small to mid-sized businesses that use credit cards in their business. Their customers simply pay the cash advance back through a percentage of their future credit card sales.
Due to the nature of their cash advance requirements, RapidAdvance must understand its customers in a timely manner to determine which companies are suitable for these advances. Unfortunately they had silos of information, data quality concerns and limited analytical information through the usage of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and manual reporting. RapidAdvance needed to create a scalable and automated reporting solution in seven weeks but with limited IT resources. To do this, they chose SAP BusinessObjects crystalreports.com SaaS solution that was used in conjunction with RapidAdvance’s existing Salesforce.com SaaS deployment.
The implementation team (only three people) was able to immediately recreate dozens of the manually maintained reports in the crystalreports.com application without the assistance of additional staff or IT support. Everything was pushed to the web for access; and once a report was created, it was automated and distributed to the appropriate employees.
The team has expanded upon this beginning with substantially more reports, an enhanced layer of security, the addition of more internal and external users, the creation of more complex analyses and all of the company’s deal pricing models. RapidAdvance now has close to 1,000 reports used both internally or externally. All reports are automatically delivered via the web to employees, partners, etc. And these are still being produced and maintained by the original small team.
RapidAdvance has leveraged these reports to improve its overall business by:
* Reporting on deal and underwriting statuses to its external partners
* Providing commission reporting
* Analyzing portfolios
* Generating internal management reports for in-house usage
* Generating account status and risk levels
* Creating virtual due diligence reports for investors to review on site
RapidAdvance has implemented a sophisticated reporting and analytical environment for its executives, employees and partners. The short implementation time, cost-effective nature of SaaS solutions, flexibility in the creation of reports and analytics, and crystalreports.com’s ability to expand as the company does were decisive to the overall success of this solution. With crystalreports.com in place, RapidAdvance can now focus on running a profitable and growing business.
Summary
The case studies gave us great insight into the need for and benefits from SaaS implementations in the business intelligence area. We discovered two predominant uses for SaaS: business-specific BI applications focusing at present on customer-facing solutions and larger scale data warehousing and BI projects.
We also gathered fascinating information from a survey we ran. From it, we found that nearly 60% of the respondents were either already using or planning to use SaaS BI and data management solutions. They cited the low cost of the solutions and their faster implementation times as the top two reasons for choosing these solutions. Almost as popular was the business focus, not IT focus, of these solutions and their easy maintenance. Our survey uncovered concerns about SaaS implementations as well with the need to understand the SaaS approach, integration with existing IT systems and security concerns leading the way.
Finally, from our case studies as well as from the SaaS vendors themselves, we discovered significant information regarding the relationship and level of involvement between the two parties. It is important for SaaS customers to remain involved with the future of the SaaS company in terms of giving direction to the technological road map, providing input into trouble areas, and demonstrating new ways for using the application’s features and functions. In return, the vendors should supply their customers with input into the technological directions of the company as well – that is to their benefit as much as it is to their customers.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Tips For Collaborating with SharePoint
Great collaboration. It means eliminating boundaries of time, place and technology so that people can work together effortlessly.
Today's business environment demands that people are able to communicate and share information effectively in any situation. That means eliminating the typical constraints of location and technology so employees can remain productive in or out of the office.
Microsoft SharePoint is an intelligent enterprise portal that provides a central place to access, manage, share and interact with relevant information, documents, applications and people. It enables faster, more informed decision making, more effective sharing across teams, and more streamlined business processes.
# Create a clear roadmap -- While your initial implementation may not have every single functionality and document you want, you still want to create a portal that has an intuitive structure that allows for future flexibility. A managed SharePoint site can be a very useful tool, but allowing all users to have control over content structure can be tricky. Maintaining a solid structure is an important success factor.
# Promote managerial direction/spearheading/adoption -- Come out of the gate with some sort of game plan establishing that this portal is THE virtual environment.
# Be flexible -- Gather input from stakeholders often and communicate with your team in whatever way works. Discussions and phone calls can be very important. Stay connected at a human level.
# Reward collaboration -- Simple acknowledgment goes a long way. You don't want to lose that personal touch with your team. Creating a sense of common purpose binds people together and inspires stakeholders to internalize collaborative efforts.
# Don't assume that your employees will take time to learn it/Do train employees -- You need to take the initiative to train your employees. When training employees, keep it non-technical. An IT person may not be the best person to head up administration.
# Recognize that it takes time to build relationships and cohesiveness -- Successful collaboration requires a high level of trust that members value the common purpose, commitment to assigned tasks, positive communication skills and have a mechanism for making decisions.
# Cultivate an atmosphere for healthy exchange of ideas and confrontation that is non-threatening and unemotional -- It is important to recognize that the process of collaboration and the efficacy of leaders will not only impact the outcome but will also influence participant satisfaction and willingness to collaborate in the future.
# Brand your portal -- Branding shows that the company is behind the solution. Employees will respect it more, use it more and contribute to it more. Especially during the launch of the portal, branding can significantly contribute to employee adoption.
Collaboration starts around a single document -- but really, it comes down to overall business intelligence. This is where clients and management lose their minds with excitement. Combining document management with extensive reports and charts are where they can truly realize the effect that the solution is having on the company. They can see people taking collaboration to an entirely different level.
By Paul West / Intranet Journal
Today's business environment demands that people are able to communicate and share information effectively in any situation. That means eliminating the typical constraints of location and technology so employees can remain productive in or out of the office.
Microsoft SharePoint is an intelligent enterprise portal that provides a central place to access, manage, share and interact with relevant information, documents, applications and people. It enables faster, more informed decision making, more effective sharing across teams, and more streamlined business processes.
# Create a clear roadmap -- While your initial implementation may not have every single functionality and document you want, you still want to create a portal that has an intuitive structure that allows for future flexibility. A managed SharePoint site can be a very useful tool, but allowing all users to have control over content structure can be tricky. Maintaining a solid structure is an important success factor.
# Promote managerial direction/spearheading/adoption -- Come out of the gate with some sort of game plan establishing that this portal is THE virtual environment.
# Be flexible -- Gather input from stakeholders often and communicate with your team in whatever way works. Discussions and phone calls can be very important. Stay connected at a human level.
# Reward collaboration -- Simple acknowledgment goes a long way. You don't want to lose that personal touch with your team. Creating a sense of common purpose binds people together and inspires stakeholders to internalize collaborative efforts.
# Don't assume that your employees will take time to learn it/Do train employees -- You need to take the initiative to train your employees. When training employees, keep it non-technical. An IT person may not be the best person to head up administration.
# Recognize that it takes time to build relationships and cohesiveness -- Successful collaboration requires a high level of trust that members value the common purpose, commitment to assigned tasks, positive communication skills and have a mechanism for making decisions.
# Cultivate an atmosphere for healthy exchange of ideas and confrontation that is non-threatening and unemotional -- It is important to recognize that the process of collaboration and the efficacy of leaders will not only impact the outcome but will also influence participant satisfaction and willingness to collaborate in the future.
# Brand your portal -- Branding shows that the company is behind the solution. Employees will respect it more, use it more and contribute to it more. Especially during the launch of the portal, branding can significantly contribute to employee adoption.
Collaboration starts around a single document -- but really, it comes down to overall business intelligence. This is where clients and management lose their minds with excitement. Combining document management with extensive reports and charts are where they can truly realize the effect that the solution is having on the company. They can see people taking collaboration to an entirely different level.
By Paul West / Intranet Journal
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Smart and cheap: Business intelligence on a budget
You don't need new tools to gain insight into your business -- here are eight ways to make the most of what you've got.
That adage from the Great Depression is making a comeback these days among corporations that are digging deep to maintain profitability using business tools they already have in-house.
One of those companies is Creativity Inc., which found itself two years ago facing a serious threat to its business model.
The company, which designs, markets and distributes crafting products to specialty retailers, was being undercut by overseas manufacturers as retailers began to buy direct. The trend preceded the current economic downturn, but has hit with renewed vigor as the recession has deepened.
"We've been adjusting to a changing landscape," says Jim Mulholland, vice president of IT, and that includes fundamentally changing its product strategy.
To find more profitable, less commodity-driven products, and to cut operating costs, Creativity turned to its existing stable of Cognos business intelligence software. "We made no new purchases at all. We are taking advantage of different parts of the Cognos system, like Event Studio," the Web-based events-management module, Mulholland says.
As the economic downturn puts a strain on revenues -- some of its clients have seen revenue drops of 50% or more, according to Gartner Inc. -- management is leaning on business intelligence (BI) tools like never before.
Nick Millman, senior director for information management services at Accenture, agrees. "The tougher times that some of our clients face have accelerated [a trend toward] getting back to BI and how business can be improved." Executives are using them to find operational savings and to refocus their product lines and strategies, he says.
As business strategies change, business models need to reflect that, says Bill Hostmann, analyst at Gartner. "Deciders need the right information models so they can be effective."
But IT organizations aren't rushing to buy new business intelligence software or build new data warehouses. Instead, they're digging deeper and doing more with existing tools from IBM Cognos, SAS, SAP Business Objects or Microsoft Business Intelligence and other BI vendors. "Organizations are trying to utilize their existing business intelligence tools without going out and buying more hardware and software," Millman says.
Follow these eight tips, say Millman and others who have been down this road, and you too can squeeze more out of your existing tools while giving your business an extra boost.
Consolidate your tools
"Usually people have more tools than they need, and that can be distracting," says Anthony Abbatista, vice president of technology solutions at Allstate Insurance Co. and a former business intelligence consultant. Organizations end up with "different pockets of people doing similar analysis with different tools," and that leads to needless confusion, he says. His recommendation: Consolidate, and be aggressive about it. "Get to the minimum number of tools you need to get the job done."
Over the past few years, Abbatista has overseen the consolidation of 13 data warehouses down to just two and has pushed the organization from a centralized business intelligence analysis and reporting function to a self-service model based on the deployment of customizable dashboards.
Settling on a standardized set of tools was the first step toward empowering business managers and analysts. After a review, Abbatista says the company "killed off" two thirds of the tools in use at the insurer, including redundant products and the "falling stars," yesterday's hot tools that are no longer considered leading edge.
Those efforts paid off before a single new report was created. The business saved on software support and licensing costs, and the simplified tools portfolio made user training on the tools easier.
Standardizing on a single set of tools also facilitated model reuse between different groups. Before, for example, the sales and finance groups had profitability models created in different tools. "If they got different results, you'd spend time trying to rationalize why that was," Abbatista says. Now the process is much more straightforward -- and different business groups can feel confident they're comparing apples to apples.
Let business take the driver's seat
As the downturn continues to reset goals and business strategies, it's more important than ever for companies to make sure that BI technology is being applied to solve the right problems. IT organizations still fall into the trap of putting their technology out front, rather than creating models that respond to changing business needs, says Accenture's Millman.
Work with the business first before developing new information models, he advises. "Start with a clear vision of how information will generate value for the organization," he says. "Think about what business interventions you hope to derive from BI tools. Understand where the business benefit is going to come from, then configure the tools and processes."
At Allstate, two areas of focus are managing loss expense ratios and measuring the effectiveness of the call center. "We've taken experts in the tools and methods and put them together with the business people to find these high-value targets," says Abbatista.
The temptation in larger organizations is to try to do too many things with BI, he observes. Having fewer tools helps with that problem, and management also needs to prioritize what is most important.
"These times have been good because they've brought focus on measuring fewer things well," says Abbatista. At the highest level of the business, Allstate's management is watching 10 or 12 different metrics, he says. While business intelligence tools used by the business units use a wider range of metrics, all of those are designed to support those upstream metrics that management is watching.
New markets call for new data models
Right now, says Gartner's Hostmann, "there's a big strategy change in many organizations from high-value product offerings to low-cost offerings." But businesses that can't compete in the low-cost market must figure out a way to move up the value chain -- and they're using BI tools to get there.
Which is what Creativity Inc. did. To combat the commoditization trend in its core markets, it used the IBM Cognos 8 BI suite to identify and develop high-value products that couldn't be easily commoditized by its low-cost competitors.
It started by purchasing transactional data from retailers in the toy, fashion and apparel segments, adding that data to its existing data warehouse, and analyzing current buying trends. Creativity also uses Smart Software's SmartForecast forecasting software against the data as well.
All that analysis has lead to more "design-oriented, fashion-oriented" products, such as a line of paper dolls based on the popular Project Runway television show.
The strategy appears to be working. Creativity's fashion-based and other unique designs have become the dominant portion of its business -- more than 50% -- and contribute an even greater proportion of its margins, Mulholland reports.
Cost-cutting efforts need to be driven by the business side as well -- another area where creative use of existing BI tools can come into play. "It's important to understand who the more profitable customer segments are, how profitable your products and services are and areas to target for cost savings," Millman says.
Centralize business intelligence
To help find the right areas of focus, Creativity's Mulholland started an analytical center for excellence, a group that includes representatives from different parts of the business, from sales to operations. "You're trying to elevate the IQ of everybody in your company in terms of knowing the key business metrics and measuring them accurately and in a timely way across all areas of the business," he says.
Moving towards that goal, Creativity developed common tool sets and profitability models for its sales and finance groups. Reports are pushed to the desktops and viewed in dashboard applications. From there, Mulholland says, users "can go in and do further analysis."
IBM has been promoting such centers among its Cognos customers as a way to create a standardized set of models across the enterprise using existing business intelligence tools. A common set of BI dashboards developed for one department, for example, can be extended for use with others. In this way, new groups don't have to reinvent the wheel and can get up and running more quickly.
BI tools also are underutilized by role. Business stakeholders may view BI as more of an IT-driven reporting and analysis tool rather than as a business tool. Or the tools may be valued by IT and only one or two other groups, such as finance. As an antidote, "what we've seen is some companies that are looking across business processes and setting up competency centers that start to foster collaboration and dialog across business units," says Anne Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS.
Put more data in your warehouse
When it comes to data warehouses, the current downturn is a great time for organizations to review what they're tracking and to add more data from business operations into the hopper to find additional savings. Just be very selective about what you add, experts advise.
Milley suggests looking at adding data from call centers, Web logs or other sources. The question companies have to ask in these times, she says, is, "What do I have that I can get [into the data warehouse] at a relatively low cost?"
As sales slowed at Creativity during the downturn, Mulholland and the center for excellence team changed its focus from keeping up with growth to cost cutting. One of those projects involved providing a feedback loop between its back-end ERP system and the CubiScan system it uses for shipping.
CubiScan is a laser-based scanning and weight-measurement system used to ensure that goods are properly packaged to meet customer specifications. (If they're not, the fees can be "considerable," Mulholland says.) While the ERP system issued package instructions with the orders, the standalone CubiScan system wasn't returning data on whether shipments were actually packaged properly -- and many were not. "There was no feedback loop," Mulholland says.
The IT team used the Cognos ETL tool (extraction, transformation and load) to bring the CubiScan data into its data warehouse and then built exception reports for shipments where the margins and tolerances for package dimensions hadn't been met. Mulholland expects the project, currently in deployment, to pay for itself in three to five months.
Make better use of data you already have
In some cases, doing "more with less" may simply be a matter of taking data that users already have and presenting it to them in a more useful way. At the Wisconsin Department of Revenue's Business Intelligence Services Bureau, director Janna Baganz says her organization found a way to present multi-year view of tax data on a single screen. "That proved to be a time-saver," she says.
Her group also worked to combine data from the state's income processing and audit systems, taking the need for exception report analysis out of the user's hands. Now when certain business rules kick out a tax return from the processing system, the staff no longer spends 20 minutes running a manual report on another system and then reviewing it to resolve the issue.
Instead, the integrated systems automatically resolve the problem and process the claim in about two minutes without staff involvement. Since July of 2008, the department has saved approximately 1,750 hours of staff time, says Pat Lashore, administrator for the department's technology services division, and taxpayers who are due a refund now receive it more quickly.
In a similar vein, Allstate has had success pushing report-creation and customization capabilities out to end users through the deployment of dashboards. Previously, the company had a centralized report-writing function within IT, and "it took a lot longer to get answers into the hands of business people," Abbatista says. Now, his team creates dashboards, walks users through the basics of using the tool, and lets them do the rest.
One goal of Allstate's is to build models very quickly with the tools they already have to prove or disprove whether a given hypothesis is any good, he says. If it is, the model will be incorporated in a dashboard and disseminated to staff.
Allstate has institutionalized dashboards to monitor its speed in closing claims and the time to resolve those claims. It wants to drive those numbers down to the point where its performance in these areas becomes a competitive advantage. The self-service environment provided by the dashboards allows managers to monitor their department's performance. They also can add or subtract factors or combine data in different ways to achieve those goals.
Back in the IT department, the self-service BI tools helped Abbatista's team get out of the report-building business and clear out a long backlog of report requests. Through the self-service initiative and a data-warehouse consolidation, he's reduced headcount by two thirds while expanding access to self-service BI tools to 25,000 users within the organization.
Keep your models clean
Make sure you have a clear and consistent data model before you bring new data into your data warehouse or bring in data from another part of the business, and then ensure the new data conforms to your model.
Too often, says Millman, information from different sources or sections of the business gets added to the data warehouse without enough attention to how the existing data is modeled. The result: "It's hard to make sense out of business reports or queries that go across more than one section." For example, financial and customer service data might be modeled in entirely different ways. Accenture, he says, spends a lot of time helping its clients re-architect the way their data is stored.
For Abbatista, re-architecting data also meant rationalizing it for different business uses as new data sources were added. For example, at Allstate, different definitions of the "policy effective date" had to be reconciled before data from different departments could be combined into a single data warehouse for analysis.
IT may also need to allay fears about data quality. If managers don't trust the quality of the underlying data, that can derail their interest in business intelligence projects before they even get started. Mistrust "is like a silent cancer in organizations," says Milley. "Companies are at the mercy of their data quality." Users may suspect that the data is old, or that too many records may be missing data in a given field, such as birth date, she says.
"A common complaint is that the quality of the data isn't good enough," even when it is, agrees Millman. To drive up use of existing BI tools, he recommends producing data-quality dashboards that show just how timely the data is. "It's about crystallizing how good the data quality is and making that visible to the business."
Help users understand the data, not just the tools
Scaling up the number of users who have access to BI tools won't help unless people know how to use them. But that's not the biggest issue when it comes to educating the user. "The trend has been for the front end to get simpler and more intuitive," Millman says. And certainly dashboards have helped in that regard.
"What's often missing is the explanation of where the data comes from and how you can use it to derive some insight," Millman says. For example, the data generated by Creativity's CubiScan system was foreign to business people in the back office. "We have to explain what the data points are and what the data points mean," Mulholland says.
Abbatista focuses on building that knowledge one user at a time. "We build out initial capabilities with front-line managers and people in the trenches. They then become the consultant to people around them."
"It's really [about] teaching people to mine for value," Abbatista sums up. In that respect, he says, "I don't think we'll ever be done with our BI efforts."
Source:Computerworld
That adage from the Great Depression is making a comeback these days among corporations that are digging deep to maintain profitability using business tools they already have in-house.
One of those companies is Creativity Inc., which found itself two years ago facing a serious threat to its business model.
The company, which designs, markets and distributes crafting products to specialty retailers, was being undercut by overseas manufacturers as retailers began to buy direct. The trend preceded the current economic downturn, but has hit with renewed vigor as the recession has deepened.
"We've been adjusting to a changing landscape," says Jim Mulholland, vice president of IT, and that includes fundamentally changing its product strategy.
To find more profitable, less commodity-driven products, and to cut operating costs, Creativity turned to its existing stable of Cognos business intelligence software. "We made no new purchases at all. We are taking advantage of different parts of the Cognos system, like Event Studio," the Web-based events-management module, Mulholland says.
As the economic downturn puts a strain on revenues -- some of its clients have seen revenue drops of 50% or more, according to Gartner Inc. -- management is leaning on business intelligence (BI) tools like never before.
Nick Millman, senior director for information management services at Accenture, agrees. "The tougher times that some of our clients face have accelerated [a trend toward] getting back to BI and how business can be improved." Executives are using them to find operational savings and to refocus their product lines and strategies, he says.
As business strategies change, business models need to reflect that, says Bill Hostmann, analyst at Gartner. "Deciders need the right information models so they can be effective."
But IT organizations aren't rushing to buy new business intelligence software or build new data warehouses. Instead, they're digging deeper and doing more with existing tools from IBM Cognos, SAS, SAP Business Objects or Microsoft Business Intelligence and other BI vendors. "Organizations are trying to utilize their existing business intelligence tools without going out and buying more hardware and software," Millman says.
Follow these eight tips, say Millman and others who have been down this road, and you too can squeeze more out of your existing tools while giving your business an extra boost.
Consolidate your tools
"Usually people have more tools than they need, and that can be distracting," says Anthony Abbatista, vice president of technology solutions at Allstate Insurance Co. and a former business intelligence consultant. Organizations end up with "different pockets of people doing similar analysis with different tools," and that leads to needless confusion, he says. His recommendation: Consolidate, and be aggressive about it. "Get to the minimum number of tools you need to get the job done."
Over the past few years, Abbatista has overseen the consolidation of 13 data warehouses down to just two and has pushed the organization from a centralized business intelligence analysis and reporting function to a self-service model based on the deployment of customizable dashboards.
Settling on a standardized set of tools was the first step toward empowering business managers and analysts. After a review, Abbatista says the company "killed off" two thirds of the tools in use at the insurer, including redundant products and the "falling stars," yesterday's hot tools that are no longer considered leading edge.
Those efforts paid off before a single new report was created. The business saved on software support and licensing costs, and the simplified tools portfolio made user training on the tools easier.
Standardizing on a single set of tools also facilitated model reuse between different groups. Before, for example, the sales and finance groups had profitability models created in different tools. "If they got different results, you'd spend time trying to rationalize why that was," Abbatista says. Now the process is much more straightforward -- and different business groups can feel confident they're comparing apples to apples.
Let business take the driver's seat
As the downturn continues to reset goals and business strategies, it's more important than ever for companies to make sure that BI technology is being applied to solve the right problems. IT organizations still fall into the trap of putting their technology out front, rather than creating models that respond to changing business needs, says Accenture's Millman.
Work with the business first before developing new information models, he advises. "Start with a clear vision of how information will generate value for the organization," he says. "Think about what business interventions you hope to derive from BI tools. Understand where the business benefit is going to come from, then configure the tools and processes."
At Allstate, two areas of focus are managing loss expense ratios and measuring the effectiveness of the call center. "We've taken experts in the tools and methods and put them together with the business people to find these high-value targets," says Abbatista.
The temptation in larger organizations is to try to do too many things with BI, he observes. Having fewer tools helps with that problem, and management also needs to prioritize what is most important.
"These times have been good because they've brought focus on measuring fewer things well," says Abbatista. At the highest level of the business, Allstate's management is watching 10 or 12 different metrics, he says. While business intelligence tools used by the business units use a wider range of metrics, all of those are designed to support those upstream metrics that management is watching.
New markets call for new data models
Right now, says Gartner's Hostmann, "there's a big strategy change in many organizations from high-value product offerings to low-cost offerings." But businesses that can't compete in the low-cost market must figure out a way to move up the value chain -- and they're using BI tools to get there.
Which is what Creativity Inc. did. To combat the commoditization trend in its core markets, it used the IBM Cognos 8 BI suite to identify and develop high-value products that couldn't be easily commoditized by its low-cost competitors.
It started by purchasing transactional data from retailers in the toy, fashion and apparel segments, adding that data to its existing data warehouse, and analyzing current buying trends. Creativity also uses Smart Software's SmartForecast forecasting software against the data as well.
All that analysis has lead to more "design-oriented, fashion-oriented" products, such as a line of paper dolls based on the popular Project Runway television show.
The strategy appears to be working. Creativity's fashion-based and other unique designs have become the dominant portion of its business -- more than 50% -- and contribute an even greater proportion of its margins, Mulholland reports.
Cost-cutting efforts need to be driven by the business side as well -- another area where creative use of existing BI tools can come into play. "It's important to understand who the more profitable customer segments are, how profitable your products and services are and areas to target for cost savings," Millman says.
Centralize business intelligence
To help find the right areas of focus, Creativity's Mulholland started an analytical center for excellence, a group that includes representatives from different parts of the business, from sales to operations. "You're trying to elevate the IQ of everybody in your company in terms of knowing the key business metrics and measuring them accurately and in a timely way across all areas of the business," he says.
Moving towards that goal, Creativity developed common tool sets and profitability models for its sales and finance groups. Reports are pushed to the desktops and viewed in dashboard applications. From there, Mulholland says, users "can go in and do further analysis."
IBM has been promoting such centers among its Cognos customers as a way to create a standardized set of models across the enterprise using existing business intelligence tools. A common set of BI dashboards developed for one department, for example, can be extended for use with others. In this way, new groups don't have to reinvent the wheel and can get up and running more quickly.
BI tools also are underutilized by role. Business stakeholders may view BI as more of an IT-driven reporting and analysis tool rather than as a business tool. Or the tools may be valued by IT and only one or two other groups, such as finance. As an antidote, "what we've seen is some companies that are looking across business processes and setting up competency centers that start to foster collaboration and dialog across business units," says Anne Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS.
Put more data in your warehouse
When it comes to data warehouses, the current downturn is a great time for organizations to review what they're tracking and to add more data from business operations into the hopper to find additional savings. Just be very selective about what you add, experts advise.
Milley suggests looking at adding data from call centers, Web logs or other sources. The question companies have to ask in these times, she says, is, "What do I have that I can get [into the data warehouse] at a relatively low cost?"
As sales slowed at Creativity during the downturn, Mulholland and the center for excellence team changed its focus from keeping up with growth to cost cutting. One of those projects involved providing a feedback loop between its back-end ERP system and the CubiScan system it uses for shipping.
CubiScan is a laser-based scanning and weight-measurement system used to ensure that goods are properly packaged to meet customer specifications. (If they're not, the fees can be "considerable," Mulholland says.) While the ERP system issued package instructions with the orders, the standalone CubiScan system wasn't returning data on whether shipments were actually packaged properly -- and many were not. "There was no feedback loop," Mulholland says.
The IT team used the Cognos ETL tool (extraction, transformation and load) to bring the CubiScan data into its data warehouse and then built exception reports for shipments where the margins and tolerances for package dimensions hadn't been met. Mulholland expects the project, currently in deployment, to pay for itself in three to five months.
Make better use of data you already have
In some cases, doing "more with less" may simply be a matter of taking data that users already have and presenting it to them in a more useful way. At the Wisconsin Department of Revenue's Business Intelligence Services Bureau, director Janna Baganz says her organization found a way to present multi-year view of tax data on a single screen. "That proved to be a time-saver," she says.
Her group also worked to combine data from the state's income processing and audit systems, taking the need for exception report analysis out of the user's hands. Now when certain business rules kick out a tax return from the processing system, the staff no longer spends 20 minutes running a manual report on another system and then reviewing it to resolve the issue.
Instead, the integrated systems automatically resolve the problem and process the claim in about two minutes without staff involvement. Since July of 2008, the department has saved approximately 1,750 hours of staff time, says Pat Lashore, administrator for the department's technology services division, and taxpayers who are due a refund now receive it more quickly.
In a similar vein, Allstate has had success pushing report-creation and customization capabilities out to end users through the deployment of dashboards. Previously, the company had a centralized report-writing function within IT, and "it took a lot longer to get answers into the hands of business people," Abbatista says. Now, his team creates dashboards, walks users through the basics of using the tool, and lets them do the rest.
One goal of Allstate's is to build models very quickly with the tools they already have to prove or disprove whether a given hypothesis is any good, he says. If it is, the model will be incorporated in a dashboard and disseminated to staff.
Allstate has institutionalized dashboards to monitor its speed in closing claims and the time to resolve those claims. It wants to drive those numbers down to the point where its performance in these areas becomes a competitive advantage. The self-service environment provided by the dashboards allows managers to monitor their department's performance. They also can add or subtract factors or combine data in different ways to achieve those goals.
Back in the IT department, the self-service BI tools helped Abbatista's team get out of the report-building business and clear out a long backlog of report requests. Through the self-service initiative and a data-warehouse consolidation, he's reduced headcount by two thirds while expanding access to self-service BI tools to 25,000 users within the organization.
Keep your models clean
Make sure you have a clear and consistent data model before you bring new data into your data warehouse or bring in data from another part of the business, and then ensure the new data conforms to your model.
Too often, says Millman, information from different sources or sections of the business gets added to the data warehouse without enough attention to how the existing data is modeled. The result: "It's hard to make sense out of business reports or queries that go across more than one section." For example, financial and customer service data might be modeled in entirely different ways. Accenture, he says, spends a lot of time helping its clients re-architect the way their data is stored.
For Abbatista, re-architecting data also meant rationalizing it for different business uses as new data sources were added. For example, at Allstate, different definitions of the "policy effective date" had to be reconciled before data from different departments could be combined into a single data warehouse for analysis.
IT may also need to allay fears about data quality. If managers don't trust the quality of the underlying data, that can derail their interest in business intelligence projects before they even get started. Mistrust "is like a silent cancer in organizations," says Milley. "Companies are at the mercy of their data quality." Users may suspect that the data is old, or that too many records may be missing data in a given field, such as birth date, she says.
"A common complaint is that the quality of the data isn't good enough," even when it is, agrees Millman. To drive up use of existing BI tools, he recommends producing data-quality dashboards that show just how timely the data is. "It's about crystallizing how good the data quality is and making that visible to the business."
Help users understand the data, not just the tools
Scaling up the number of users who have access to BI tools won't help unless people know how to use them. But that's not the biggest issue when it comes to educating the user. "The trend has been for the front end to get simpler and more intuitive," Millman says. And certainly dashboards have helped in that regard.
"What's often missing is the explanation of where the data comes from and how you can use it to derive some insight," Millman says. For example, the data generated by Creativity's CubiScan system was foreign to business people in the back office. "We have to explain what the data points are and what the data points mean," Mulholland says.
Abbatista focuses on building that knowledge one user at a time. "We build out initial capabilities with front-line managers and people in the trenches. They then become the consultant to people around them."
"It's really [about] teaching people to mine for value," Abbatista sums up. In that respect, he says, "I don't think we'll ever be done with our BI efforts."
Source:Computerworld
Monday, May 11, 2009
SAP's McDermott On Mobility, SaaS & Business Intelligence
When I sat down with Bill McDermott, president of SAP (NYSE: SAP)'s Global Field Operations, all I wanted to talk about was whether software-as-a-service is upending traditional self-hosted software. So it almost went by me when he mentioned that SAP would soon have some Business Intelligence news. We also discussed mobile apps, plus Bill had some tough words for competitor Oracle. Click on to access the video and podcast.
On Mobility
McDermott is a big advocate for mobile apps.
"We think mobility is huge," he says. "If you look at the business user today, they are mobile. I'm mobile, and every other business user I know travels a lot, and prefers to have their applications on their hip, as opposed to being tethered on a line and having to lock in at a hotel. So the more we can move SAP business applications to mobile devices, the more successful they'll be."
I explored that with the SAP folks back in March, when they linked up with Sybase in a deal to make it easier for SAP apps to run on mobile devices, including the iPhone, Windows Mobile Devices, and Blackberry. (SAP also has a separate partnership with Blackberry maker RIM.) You can listen to that podcast; see Sybase, SAP Talk Smartphone Apps.
McDermott says more such partnerships may be in the offing, as SAP looks to expand the range of apps and mobile platforms available for customers.
On SaaS
Let's just admit that Software-as-a-Service, as popularized by the links of Salesforce.com, isn't something that was welcomed with open arms by long-time enterprise software players. It up-ended their business model, and prodded them to expand their pallet of offerings. Interestingly, though, where we are now is that the polarity between SaaS providers on the one hand and traditional "we license it, you host it" players on the other may end up being replaced by a model where the survivors are mixed-modality vendors. (Well, Salesforce.com will still probably stake out that left SaaS wing.)
SAP is clearly evolving toward a "Burger King" approach to the question of self-host software of SaaS. Namely, as McDermott says, customers can "have it their way."
Moving forward he sees the two approaches coexisting in a way that's not necessarily in conflict. "I think both models are viable" McDermott says. "There are mission-critical, end-to-end business processes that large companies run to keep their company going. They have large transaction rates and they require visibility on an end-to-end basis and very tight integration. Those processes will continue to be run on-premise. There will also be loosely coupled applications that don't need to be tightly coupled to the core process in the enterprise. Those will be easily provisioned in an on-demand model."
He continues: "Ultimately, the best of both worlds is to have full integration in the enterprise where you have to have it for risk management, compliance, and execution, and still be able to integrate the on-demand model into the enterprise. That's the hybrid model that SAP sees. That's the model we think gives the customer the most value."
On Oracle
Fireworks flew in our interview when McDermott offered up some tough words for competitor Oracle: "I think theirs is much more of a paper strategy," he said. "Our strategy is much more innovation, ecosystem, and customer-centric. I think that's where we divide the two."
McDermott drew a pointed comparision. "Others -- now that you mention Oracle -- have chosen to impart themselves on what I would call a twentieth century company strategy," he said. "Because innovation has been difficult for them, they've chosen to acquire as many companies as they can, to create a business model out of it. When they ran out of software companies to buy, they've now moved into the realm of hardware in the Sun acquisition. So I think theirs is much more of a paper strategy, to satisfy the capital markets."
On Multitenancy
A discussion about multitenancy is something only a true SaaS geek could love. Nevertheless, it's an important issue that's of huge concern to users. Dumbing it down as best as I can, the issue is as follows: In serving multiple customers who've all bought access to the same app, in the simplest case a SaaS vendor would have to run a new instance of the app for each of those customers. However, at some point (an early point) the hosting hardware would grind to a halt under the strain.
A quick way around this problem is out-of-the-box virtualization, which can vastly reduce the number of instances you have to get going. However, this doesn't address security issues.
So what SaaS vendors have to do is re-architecture their apps to support true multitenant operation. This means that they can run many instances on a single box, thus reducing server costs (not a big deal) and IT management/support expenses (a bigger deal). The key deal in this "rearchitecturization" for multitenancy is to get the partitioning right so that each customer's data is sandboxed in their own virtual instance, over which they and only they have control. Whew!
OK, so the deal is that getting all this stuff right takes time. In SAP's case, that's played out in some previous push-back to the rollout date of its Business ByDesign offering. In our chat, McDermott addressed the issue:
"What we want to do is make sure the features of the product as well as the performance of the product is up to SAP's standards," he said. "We think SAP Business ByDesign is a killer applicaton that can move major markets. So what we're doing is getting the provisioning of that service to the customer at a margin rate that can satisfy SAP shareholders. We'll get that product to market when it's ready. We'd rather be a little bit behind in delivery, and perfectly right when it hits the customer."
On Business Intelligence
We got to the BI news almost as an afterthought, when I asked McDermott a closing question I hoped would elicit a non-SAP related answer. I asked him what he personally gets excited about, and he used it to segue into a soliloquy on the wonders of BI.
Here's what he said: "We are introducing a technology to the market soon that we're calling Explorer. It's the combination of Business Warehouse Accelerator, where we can get data, process that data -- millions of records at sub-second speed -- and provide that to the user in a highly pleasing manner. And it gives you the chance to make real-time decisions, based on the things that you really care about in your enterprise."
What I know previously about SAP's BI efforts are that its software revolves around the SAP NetWeaver BI platform. On a second front, SAP acquired Business Objects in 2007 and has integrated the latter's software into SAP proper under the umbrella of SAP BusinessObjects Portfolio.
As to what McDermott mentioned, Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) is a product which already exists. It's officially called SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse Accelerator, and it’s a plug-in which (I think I'm simplifying it correctly here) boosts the performance of NetWeaver Business Warehouse so that you can use it as a real-time product. (I.e., you install NetWeaver BW and then also install the out-of-box accelerator on, say, your Xeon-based server, and, presto, you can support real-time queries.)
However, it's likely that Bill was talking about a new product launch, combining SAP Business Objects BI software with BWA in-memory analysis capabilities. In which case, stay tuned (the news should be out this week). (BTW, if you want to get the scoop from BI experts, go read my buddy Doug Henschen and the other great writers over at our sister site Intelligent Enterprise.)
On Mobility
McDermott is a big advocate for mobile apps.
"We think mobility is huge," he says. "If you look at the business user today, they are mobile. I'm mobile, and every other business user I know travels a lot, and prefers to have their applications on their hip, as opposed to being tethered on a line and having to lock in at a hotel. So the more we can move SAP business applications to mobile devices, the more successful they'll be."
I explored that with the SAP folks back in March, when they linked up with Sybase in a deal to make it easier for SAP apps to run on mobile devices, including the iPhone, Windows Mobile Devices, and Blackberry. (SAP also has a separate partnership with Blackberry maker RIM.) You can listen to that podcast; see Sybase, SAP Talk Smartphone Apps.
McDermott says more such partnerships may be in the offing, as SAP looks to expand the range of apps and mobile platforms available for customers.
On SaaS
Let's just admit that Software-as-a-Service, as popularized by the links of Salesforce.com, isn't something that was welcomed with open arms by long-time enterprise software players. It up-ended their business model, and prodded them to expand their pallet of offerings. Interestingly, though, where we are now is that the polarity between SaaS providers on the one hand and traditional "we license it, you host it" players on the other may end up being replaced by a model where the survivors are mixed-modality vendors. (Well, Salesforce.com will still probably stake out that left SaaS wing.)
SAP is clearly evolving toward a "Burger King" approach to the question of self-host software of SaaS. Namely, as McDermott says, customers can "have it their way."
Moving forward he sees the two approaches coexisting in a way that's not necessarily in conflict. "I think both models are viable" McDermott says. "There are mission-critical, end-to-end business processes that large companies run to keep their company going. They have large transaction rates and they require visibility on an end-to-end basis and very tight integration. Those processes will continue to be run on-premise. There will also be loosely coupled applications that don't need to be tightly coupled to the core process in the enterprise. Those will be easily provisioned in an on-demand model."
He continues: "Ultimately, the best of both worlds is to have full integration in the enterprise where you have to have it for risk management, compliance, and execution, and still be able to integrate the on-demand model into the enterprise. That's the hybrid model that SAP sees. That's the model we think gives the customer the most value."
On Oracle
Fireworks flew in our interview when McDermott offered up some tough words for competitor Oracle: "I think theirs is much more of a paper strategy," he said. "Our strategy is much more innovation, ecosystem, and customer-centric. I think that's where we divide the two."
McDermott drew a pointed comparision. "Others -- now that you mention Oracle -- have chosen to impart themselves on what I would call a twentieth century company strategy," he said. "Because innovation has been difficult for them, they've chosen to acquire as many companies as they can, to create a business model out of it. When they ran out of software companies to buy, they've now moved into the realm of hardware in the Sun acquisition. So I think theirs is much more of a paper strategy, to satisfy the capital markets."
On Multitenancy
A discussion about multitenancy is something only a true SaaS geek could love. Nevertheless, it's an important issue that's of huge concern to users. Dumbing it down as best as I can, the issue is as follows: In serving multiple customers who've all bought access to the same app, in the simplest case a SaaS vendor would have to run a new instance of the app for each of those customers. However, at some point (an early point) the hosting hardware would grind to a halt under the strain.
A quick way around this problem is out-of-the-box virtualization, which can vastly reduce the number of instances you have to get going. However, this doesn't address security issues.
So what SaaS vendors have to do is re-architecture their apps to support true multitenant operation. This means that they can run many instances on a single box, thus reducing server costs (not a big deal) and IT management/support expenses (a bigger deal). The key deal in this "rearchitecturization" for multitenancy is to get the partitioning right so that each customer's data is sandboxed in their own virtual instance, over which they and only they have control. Whew!
OK, so the deal is that getting all this stuff right takes time. In SAP's case, that's played out in some previous push-back to the rollout date of its Business ByDesign offering. In our chat, McDermott addressed the issue:
"What we want to do is make sure the features of the product as well as the performance of the product is up to SAP's standards," he said. "We think SAP Business ByDesign is a killer applicaton that can move major markets. So what we're doing is getting the provisioning of that service to the customer at a margin rate that can satisfy SAP shareholders. We'll get that product to market when it's ready. We'd rather be a little bit behind in delivery, and perfectly right when it hits the customer."
On Business Intelligence
We got to the BI news almost as an afterthought, when I asked McDermott a closing question I hoped would elicit a non-SAP related answer. I asked him what he personally gets excited about, and he used it to segue into a soliloquy on the wonders of BI.
Here's what he said: "We are introducing a technology to the market soon that we're calling Explorer. It's the combination of Business Warehouse Accelerator, where we can get data, process that data -- millions of records at sub-second speed -- and provide that to the user in a highly pleasing manner. And it gives you the chance to make real-time decisions, based on the things that you really care about in your enterprise."
What I know previously about SAP's BI efforts are that its software revolves around the SAP NetWeaver BI platform. On a second front, SAP acquired Business Objects in 2007 and has integrated the latter's software into SAP proper under the umbrella of SAP BusinessObjects Portfolio.
As to what McDermott mentioned, Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) is a product which already exists. It's officially called SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse Accelerator, and it’s a plug-in which (I think I'm simplifying it correctly here) boosts the performance of NetWeaver Business Warehouse so that you can use it as a real-time product. (I.e., you install NetWeaver BW and then also install the out-of-box accelerator on, say, your Xeon-based server, and, presto, you can support real-time queries.)
However, it's likely that Bill was talking about a new product launch, combining SAP Business Objects BI software with BWA in-memory analysis capabilities. In which case, stay tuned (the news should be out this week). (BTW, if you want to get the scoop from BI experts, go read my buddy Doug Henschen and the other great writers over at our sister site Intelligent Enterprise.)
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Enhancing CRM with Content as a Service
By Phil Wainewright
PW: Well Rand, of course, we've been having these conversations for more than ten years, since back to the dark old days of SaaS — when it was called ASP, and no one really believed that you could run software and applications in the cloud.
RS: That's right. Well certainly, all of our heads were sort of in the cloud, all the early guys' heads were in the clouds back then. And now, it's kind of funny that we're calling it cloud. As you know, we started talking when [my then company] brought out the first web analytics application, KeyLime Software, that was eventually sold to Yahoo and we were an ASP. We've come a long way since then.
At that point, we were serving a multitenant software product to users, and they could literally flip the switch on. A lot has changed, obviously, the success of Salesforce, Successfactors, Omniture, WebSideStory and others that I've been involved in, in the, quote, ASP or software-as-a-service business for ten years.
So what I wanted to talk about today a little bit was content-as-a-service. A lot of people are talking about platform-as-a-service. I wanted to give some more explanation about what content-as-a-service is.
Yeah, because one of the things I think that is very interesting about InsideView is the way that it is not just a software application, but it's also taking content as well, and delivering content-as-a-service in a way that is timely and relevant for the salesperson. When they need to work out which is the best customer for them to call next, or what should they say when they call the customer, InsideView really pulls information off the web and off social media that people can use, doesn't it?
That's right. What's happening today, unfortunately for the newspapers' sake, is content has become absolutely commoditized. And the content 1.0 vendors — companies like OneSource and Hoover's — who use people to create the editorial, they're going the way of dinosaurs. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zoom Information, InsideView, Jigsaw, we're all able to utilize content-as-a-service to get the rich set of content out there, and to present it to sales and marketing people when they need it — that is at the time of the sale so that they can increase conversion; where they need it, mashed up right into a CRM application; and to provide that relevance in this explosion of content to that end user — that sales and marketing end user — at the right time.
So how does this work? Can you give me a real-life example of how a salesperson might use this?
Yeah. We are involved with a new set of companies. They're really Sales 2.0 companies. And Sales 2.0 companies are bringing more of a science to what was previously sales as more of an art. And let me give you an example. We talked about this explosion of content. And the explosion of content really yields wrong information, a loss of time and a lack of relevance. So if a sales guy wanted to try to reach me, let's say, as a marketing person, one could go to the web and do a basic Google search on me and you will find that I am at five or six different companies.
And so what is the salesperson to do? So what InsideView does is, we use our entity triangulation and our natural language processing to produce a smart record. That smart record takes a look at all of the content that's out there — much of it wrong — takes a look at all that content out there and provides relevance to that content, so that that sales guy knows how to reach me and when I changed from, let's say, one company to another.
Right. Okay. So really what you're doing is — there's still a lot of algorithms and software technology involved there — but you're applying it to the content and then delivering — or filtering the content, really — to deliver useful information to the salesperson.
That's right. If you think back 15 or 20 years, Michael Bloomberg created the Bloomberg terminal. So as the Bloomberg terminals are to traders, SalesView, our application, really is to sales and marketing professionals — where we are aggregating relevant information, putting it in front of those traders — or sales and marketing people and — where those people can get the conversion that they need.
And of course, it's a mash-up isn't it? What you've done is you've taken the software but you're also taking these information and content feeds and mashing up all of that information and intelligence to deliver a result. So that's very much a Web 2.0 concept that you've applied in the product — or the service, rather, I should say — that you're bringing to market.
Yeah, that's right. The term mashup is another one of those terms that people throw around. We have actually two ways that we're mashed up. We bring all of this rich set of content, this information, directly to the users and we're mashed-up in the first way directly in a CRM application. We currently are supporting six CRM applications — we announced NetSuite last week — and they include Salesforce, Sugar, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Landslide. So we're mashed-up both physically in the page, right in the middle of that CRM page. But we're also mashed-up in terms of data, so that our data is completely synchronized with the data that you have in your CRM application.
I mean that's great, actually — and that's the thing about SaaS, that we've got to with this SaaS revolution now — that the old way of doing this would be, the software vendor delivers the software package. And it's like a toolkit, where the customer has to engineer all these links into all these information services that they sign up to individually — and then integrated into the other applications they are using on premise — and maybe a year or two later, and coachloads of consultants later, they actually have something that might deliver something like the result they originally envisioned. Whereas here you are, you bring it in and it's already integrated, it already has the stuff there and people can just get on and do the job.
That's right. So we're able to further yield relevance to the content out there — and we're actually looking at the content or the content vendors as almost content cartridges, where we can plug in these content cartridges to our bus that can easily delete and add new content cartridges. And through our APIs, we're also looking — because we have the ability to mash up, because we're a content-as-a-service cloud application — we're looking to push this aggregated content out to other applications, and embed this application in other, let's say, marketing applications or vertical applications — legal applications, financial applications, health applications — where we just show up in those applications as well.
Source:ebizQ.net
PW: Well Rand, of course, we've been having these conversations for more than ten years, since back to the dark old days of SaaS — when it was called ASP, and no one really believed that you could run software and applications in the cloud.
RS: That's right. Well certainly, all of our heads were sort of in the cloud, all the early guys' heads were in the clouds back then. And now, it's kind of funny that we're calling it cloud. As you know, we started talking when [my then company] brought out the first web analytics application, KeyLime Software, that was eventually sold to Yahoo and we were an ASP. We've come a long way since then.
At that point, we were serving a multitenant software product to users, and they could literally flip the switch on. A lot has changed, obviously, the success of Salesforce, Successfactors, Omniture, WebSideStory and others that I've been involved in, in the, quote, ASP or software-as-a-service business for ten years.
So what I wanted to talk about today a little bit was content-as-a-service. A lot of people are talking about platform-as-a-service. I wanted to give some more explanation about what content-as-a-service is.
Yeah, because one of the things I think that is very interesting about InsideView is the way that it is not just a software application, but it's also taking content as well, and delivering content-as-a-service in a way that is timely and relevant for the salesperson. When they need to work out which is the best customer for them to call next, or what should they say when they call the customer, InsideView really pulls information off the web and off social media that people can use, doesn't it?
That's right. What's happening today, unfortunately for the newspapers' sake, is content has become absolutely commoditized. And the content 1.0 vendors — companies like OneSource and Hoover's — who use people to create the editorial, they're going the way of dinosaurs. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zoom Information, InsideView, Jigsaw, we're all able to utilize content-as-a-service to get the rich set of content out there, and to present it to sales and marketing people when they need it — that is at the time of the sale so that they can increase conversion; where they need it, mashed up right into a CRM application; and to provide that relevance in this explosion of content to that end user — that sales and marketing end user — at the right time.
So how does this work? Can you give me a real-life example of how a salesperson might use this?
Yeah. We are involved with a new set of companies. They're really Sales 2.0 companies. And Sales 2.0 companies are bringing more of a science to what was previously sales as more of an art. And let me give you an example. We talked about this explosion of content. And the explosion of content really yields wrong information, a loss of time and a lack of relevance. So if a sales guy wanted to try to reach me, let's say, as a marketing person, one could go to the web and do a basic Google search on me and you will find that I am at five or six different companies.
And so what is the salesperson to do? So what InsideView does is, we use our entity triangulation and our natural language processing to produce a smart record. That smart record takes a look at all of the content that's out there — much of it wrong — takes a look at all that content out there and provides relevance to that content, so that that sales guy knows how to reach me and when I changed from, let's say, one company to another.
Right. Okay. So really what you're doing is — there's still a lot of algorithms and software technology involved there — but you're applying it to the content and then delivering — or filtering the content, really — to deliver useful information to the salesperson.
That's right. If you think back 15 or 20 years, Michael Bloomberg created the Bloomberg terminal. So as the Bloomberg terminals are to traders, SalesView, our application, really is to sales and marketing professionals — where we are aggregating relevant information, putting it in front of those traders — or sales and marketing people and — where those people can get the conversion that they need.
And of course, it's a mash-up isn't it? What you've done is you've taken the software but you're also taking these information and content feeds and mashing up all of that information and intelligence to deliver a result. So that's very much a Web 2.0 concept that you've applied in the product — or the service, rather, I should say — that you're bringing to market.
Yeah, that's right. The term mashup is another one of those terms that people throw around. We have actually two ways that we're mashed up. We bring all of this rich set of content, this information, directly to the users and we're mashed-up in the first way directly in a CRM application. We currently are supporting six CRM applications — we announced NetSuite last week — and they include Salesforce, Sugar, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Landslide. So we're mashed-up both physically in the page, right in the middle of that CRM page. But we're also mashed-up in terms of data, so that our data is completely synchronized with the data that you have in your CRM application.
I mean that's great, actually — and that's the thing about SaaS, that we've got to with this SaaS revolution now — that the old way of doing this would be, the software vendor delivers the software package. And it's like a toolkit, where the customer has to engineer all these links into all these information services that they sign up to individually — and then integrated into the other applications they are using on premise — and maybe a year or two later, and coachloads of consultants later, they actually have something that might deliver something like the result they originally envisioned. Whereas here you are, you bring it in and it's already integrated, it already has the stuff there and people can just get on and do the job.
That's right. So we're able to further yield relevance to the content out there — and we're actually looking at the content or the content vendors as almost content cartridges, where we can plug in these content cartridges to our bus that can easily delete and add new content cartridges. And through our APIs, we're also looking — because we have the ability to mash up, because we're a content-as-a-service cloud application — we're looking to push this aggregated content out to other applications, and embed this application in other, let's say, marketing applications or vertical applications — legal applications, financial applications, health applications — where we just show up in those applications as well.
Source:ebizQ.net
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Customer Feedback Drives New Release of Quadrant's IntelliChief
by Alex Woodie
Quadrant Software last week unveiled a new release of its flagship IntelliChief document management and workflow product at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nevada. IntelliChief 2.5 brings a smattering of relatively minor enhancements, such as automatic document matching and performance metrics, which demonstrate that customers are using the product and giving Quadrant feedback on how to make it better.
There are two main paths that product development can take. The first springs from the mind of a single creative individual who is eager to push the latest technologies into his product. This type of development often looks very advanced on paper, but it can also lead to customers asking themselves "How am I going to use this?" and "Do I really need that?"
The second type of development path is marked primarily by customer feedback to the developers. After customers have been using a product for a while, they will say to their vendor, "This is great, but what I really need is this" or "My users could really benefit from that." Sometimes, the features resulting from this development path lack the tech appeal that looks so good in press releases, but which is of dubious value to the majority of customers.
The version 2.5 release of IntelliChief appears to have been driven primarily by this second development paradigm. There aren't a lot of whiz-bang new features that jump out as super incredibly awesome. But taken as a whole, the enhancements show how System i shops are using this Windows-based product, which is only four years old, but which appears to be maturing rapidly, thanks in large part to customer feedback.
One of these customer-driven features is the matching of workflow documents. When a document enters the product's workflow system, with version 2.5, IntelliChief will automatically check to see if there are other documents waiting for a match before they're processed. For example, when an invoice is received, a clerk will typically be required to match that invoice with receiving document, to avoid making payments on products that haven't yet been received.
With IntelliChief 2.5, that matching process will be conducted automatically upon receipt of the invoice, eliminating the need for the clerk to manually match the documents, and also decreasing the possibility that the whole payment process is hung up due to a simple error or oversight. The system can automatically match documents by several variables, including customer number, order number, or vendor number.
IntelliChief 2.5 also gets new performance metrics. With this release, the product gives users the capability to track how various documents are being used within the business, which can give a good indication of how business is going.
Examples of how this feature could be used include: Showing a manager how many invoices have been sent out for voucher versus how many are still waiting for approval; showing a manager how many orders have been fulfilled and how long it took to process them; and showing a manager which accounts payable group is being more productive.
One wouldn't normally expect to find this type of business intelligence (BI) or business performance management (BPM) feature within a content management system like IntelliChief. But when you consider that most businesses are heavily dependent upon paperwork, then you realize that this is actually a very practical way to monitor business activity.
The performance metric functionality is built into IntelliChief's SQL Server database, which means that users won't have to go through the time and expense of building their own BI system or reporting mechanisms to do this. It gives users the capability to write their own reports, or output data into other reporting systems, such as SAP's CrystalReports, according to Quadrant.
Another example of customer-driven enhancements is the new capability to edit forms in IntelliChief's WebForms module, which was introduced last year. In the first release of WebForms, once a comment had been entered, such as for a purchase request or a petty cash request, it was sent to the IntelliChief archive, where it could not be modified. With version 2.5, WebForm entries can be edited and modified before being sent to a manger, thereby increasing the chance that that 50-inch plasma TV gets approved for the break room (or whatever your request may be).
A new notification capability in IntelliChief 2.5 should improve the flow of work in a business. With this release, users can now view notifications of alerts for things such as pending document approvals directly from their main IntelliChief screen, instead of viewing alerts only within their IntelliChief inbox. Users can also see detailed information about the documents from their main screen, and click on a hyperlink to be taken directly to the document.
IntelliChief also received enhancements in the way it handles multiple documents, for viewing and e-mail attachment purposes. When it comes to viewing, users can now view multiple documents on their screens simultaneously, thereby making it easier to verify or match documents. Similarly, IntelliChief supports the capability to group multiple related documents into a single e-mail attachment, instead of requiring a recipient to deal with multiple document attachments. IntelliChief typically saves documents in the PDF format.
This release also brings support for the latest Microsoft server technology, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. It also gains the capability to capture print output from 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.
IntelliChief is composed of six core modules, including ScanChief, PortalChief, WorkflowChief, ViewChief, StorageChief, and Quadrant's Formtastic software, and also works with Quadrant's i5/OS output management software. Pricing for the suite starts at around $50,000. For more information, visit intellichief.quadrantsoftware.com.
Quadrant Software last week unveiled a new release of its flagship IntelliChief document management and workflow product at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nevada. IntelliChief 2.5 brings a smattering of relatively minor enhancements, such as automatic document matching and performance metrics, which demonstrate that customers are using the product and giving Quadrant feedback on how to make it better.
There are two main paths that product development can take. The first springs from the mind of a single creative individual who is eager to push the latest technologies into his product. This type of development often looks very advanced on paper, but it can also lead to customers asking themselves "How am I going to use this?" and "Do I really need that?"
The second type of development path is marked primarily by customer feedback to the developers. After customers have been using a product for a while, they will say to their vendor, "This is great, but what I really need is this" or "My users could really benefit from that." Sometimes, the features resulting from this development path lack the tech appeal that looks so good in press releases, but which is of dubious value to the majority of customers.
The version 2.5 release of IntelliChief appears to have been driven primarily by this second development paradigm. There aren't a lot of whiz-bang new features that jump out as super incredibly awesome. But taken as a whole, the enhancements show how System i shops are using this Windows-based product, which is only four years old, but which appears to be maturing rapidly, thanks in large part to customer feedback.
One of these customer-driven features is the matching of workflow documents. When a document enters the product's workflow system, with version 2.5, IntelliChief will automatically check to see if there are other documents waiting for a match before they're processed. For example, when an invoice is received, a clerk will typically be required to match that invoice with receiving document, to avoid making payments on products that haven't yet been received.
With IntelliChief 2.5, that matching process will be conducted automatically upon receipt of the invoice, eliminating the need for the clerk to manually match the documents, and also decreasing the possibility that the whole payment process is hung up due to a simple error or oversight. The system can automatically match documents by several variables, including customer number, order number, or vendor number.
IntelliChief 2.5 also gets new performance metrics. With this release, the product gives users the capability to track how various documents are being used within the business, which can give a good indication of how business is going.
Examples of how this feature could be used include: Showing a manager how many invoices have been sent out for voucher versus how many are still waiting for approval; showing a manager how many orders have been fulfilled and how long it took to process them; and showing a manager which accounts payable group is being more productive.
One wouldn't normally expect to find this type of business intelligence (BI) or business performance management (BPM) feature within a content management system like IntelliChief. But when you consider that most businesses are heavily dependent upon paperwork, then you realize that this is actually a very practical way to monitor business activity.
The performance metric functionality is built into IntelliChief's SQL Server database, which means that users won't have to go through the time and expense of building their own BI system or reporting mechanisms to do this. It gives users the capability to write their own reports, or output data into other reporting systems, such as SAP's CrystalReports, according to Quadrant.
Another example of customer-driven enhancements is the new capability to edit forms in IntelliChief's WebForms module, which was introduced last year. In the first release of WebForms, once a comment had been entered, such as for a purchase request or a petty cash request, it was sent to the IntelliChief archive, where it could not be modified. With version 2.5, WebForm entries can be edited and modified before being sent to a manger, thereby increasing the chance that that 50-inch plasma TV gets approved for the break room (or whatever your request may be).
A new notification capability in IntelliChief 2.5 should improve the flow of work in a business. With this release, users can now view notifications of alerts for things such as pending document approvals directly from their main IntelliChief screen, instead of viewing alerts only within their IntelliChief inbox. Users can also see detailed information about the documents from their main screen, and click on a hyperlink to be taken directly to the document.
IntelliChief also received enhancements in the way it handles multiple documents, for viewing and e-mail attachment purposes. When it comes to viewing, users can now view multiple documents on their screens simultaneously, thereby making it easier to verify or match documents. Similarly, IntelliChief supports the capability to group multiple related documents into a single e-mail attachment, instead of requiring a recipient to deal with multiple document attachments. IntelliChief typically saves documents in the PDF format.
This release also brings support for the latest Microsoft server technology, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. It also gains the capability to capture print output from 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.
IntelliChief is composed of six core modules, including ScanChief, PortalChief, WorkflowChief, ViewChief, StorageChief, and Quadrant's Formtastic software, and also works with Quadrant's i5/OS output management software. Pricing for the suite starts at around $50,000. For more information, visit intellichief.quadrantsoftware.com.
Companies turn to in-house training to supplement employees business degrees with job-specific skills
Canadians attend college or university not only to learn about a certain subject, but also to prepare for the workforce. So why are companies developing in-house training programs for their employees? And why are employees eagerly taking them?
Because as valuable as post-secondary education is, it can never be geared entirely to training individuals for a specific job within a particular organization.
So companies, such as Cognos, Wunderman, Bank of Montreal and Ceridian, have created in-house training programs, which are generally a blend of online and classroom training lasting anywhere from two hours to two days, to ensure employees have the skills to excel in their jobs.
Some courses address technical proficiency. Of course, individuals come to their jobs with a foundation, but sometimes the core skill set needs to be further developed. At Wunderman University, for example, the co-creative director of the advertising agency teaches an "evaluating great creative course," to what the company calls "apprentice-level" employees ( junior copywriters and designers) and more senior "journeyman level" ones as a refresher.
In other cases, employees need to learn a technical skill to carry out a job task, a PowerPoint presentation, for example. That's why Ceridian, a payroll and human resources management services company, has basic desktop user courses online, such as "creating animations in PowerPoint" or "pivet tables in Excel."
While some technical skills, such as the desktop programs, can be learned through standard licensed courses, others require customized classes. "We have a payroll [software] program that our customers use called InSync that employees can't learn elsewhere," says Heather Turnbull-Smith, director of national learning and development at Ceridian.
The customized classes are taught by senior and executive-level staff, who draw examples from the day-to-day business. "In 'how to write a creative brief,' our vice-president of creative direction showed us an example of a brief written for the client Wyeth, and I was able to apply the learning to the client I work with, Microsoft," says Leann Kirwan, account supervisor at Wunderman.
Companies also provide personal skills training because working with others doesn't come naturally to everyone and isn't formally taught in school. Ms. Kirwan found the "communicating for results" course at Wunderman University especially helpful because it taught her how to work with different personalities in the office. "They didn't actually teach these skills in any of my advertising courses at Georgian College," she says. Similarly, Cognos, an Ottawa-based business intelligence and performance management solutions company, offers employees courses on "how to deal with and resolve conflict," and "adapting to change."
And when employees take in-house training together, it improves their ability to function as a team. Frank Ouyang, manager of technical solutions for localization services at Cognos, says, "the opportunity to interact with coworkers during in-house training has benefits beyond networking. I often find we are building and sharing business context with participants [who] work in different functions."
But it's the in-house management training that employers and employees feel is most beneficial. "We were observing that as people were required to take on supervisory roles, most had little prior experience," says John Wright, executive vice-president at advertising agency Wunderman, and "dean" of Toronto's Wunderman University.
Even employees with an advanced degree, such as Mr. Ouyang, who holds a Master's in computer science from Computing Technology Institute, China Academy in Beijing, was keen to take almost 30 in-house management courses including "reaching group agreement" and "leading successful meetings," so he could operate as an effective manager.
"The training courses are about soft skills, which were missing from my university course," Mr. Ouyang says.
Employees could take management training as part of an MBA program or through an external professional development organization, but Jerilyn Pattle, team manager, small business solutions at Ceridian in Winnipeg, argues in-house training is more applicable because it's tailored to her company and industry.
"In our 'manager essentials' course, we're all doing the same job from across the country and so it's easier to think of examples of how we're going to apply the learning."
However, don't assume inhouse training will be a fast-track to the executive suite. First of all, the opportunity to take career development courses is of secondary importance.
"We don't want managers to send employees to courses all over the place; the No. 1 priority is to get employees the skills they need to do their job well," says Ms. Turnbull-Smith.
Also, not all the employees interviewed say that in-house training advanced their careers. Myra Cridland was a senior manager, head office, retail bank division at Bank of Montreal, when she took a specialized three-year BMO-Dalhousie MBA at the $50-million Institute for Learning. Now the vice-president and chief administrative officer of private client group at BMO, she says, "without it [the training], I wouldn't be where I am today."
However, her training experience was unconventional in that it was actually an MBA degree.
Whereas Ceridian's Ms. Pattle, who has had three promotions in six years, says the Business of Administration diploma, the human resources diploma, and the certificate in management, all of which she took at Red River College in Winnipeg, played a more instrumental role in her promotions.
Wunderman's Ms. Kirwan, who was recently promoted, also reports "the courses didn't affect my review." It was her performance on the job that was the biggest factor.
Also when moving companies, the credibility of an employee's in-house training in the eyes of another employer is often tied to the reputation of the company the employee worked for, says Jeremy Miller, partner at LEAPJob, a Toronto-based recruiting company that specializes in sales professionals.
"If it's unbranded training, as a recruiter, you've got to figure out how good the level of knowledge is."
Source:thestarphoenix.com
Because as valuable as post-secondary education is, it can never be geared entirely to training individuals for a specific job within a particular organization.
So companies, such as Cognos, Wunderman, Bank of Montreal and Ceridian, have created in-house training programs, which are generally a blend of online and classroom training lasting anywhere from two hours to two days, to ensure employees have the skills to excel in their jobs.
Some courses address technical proficiency. Of course, individuals come to their jobs with a foundation, but sometimes the core skill set needs to be further developed. At Wunderman University, for example, the co-creative director of the advertising agency teaches an "evaluating great creative course," to what the company calls "apprentice-level" employees ( junior copywriters and designers) and more senior "journeyman level" ones as a refresher.
In other cases, employees need to learn a technical skill to carry out a job task, a PowerPoint presentation, for example. That's why Ceridian, a payroll and human resources management services company, has basic desktop user courses online, such as "creating animations in PowerPoint" or "pivet tables in Excel."
While some technical skills, such as the desktop programs, can be learned through standard licensed courses, others require customized classes. "We have a payroll [software] program that our customers use called InSync that employees can't learn elsewhere," says Heather Turnbull-Smith, director of national learning and development at Ceridian.
The customized classes are taught by senior and executive-level staff, who draw examples from the day-to-day business. "In 'how to write a creative brief,' our vice-president of creative direction showed us an example of a brief written for the client Wyeth, and I was able to apply the learning to the client I work with, Microsoft," says Leann Kirwan, account supervisor at Wunderman.
Companies also provide personal skills training because working with others doesn't come naturally to everyone and isn't formally taught in school. Ms. Kirwan found the "communicating for results" course at Wunderman University especially helpful because it taught her how to work with different personalities in the office. "They didn't actually teach these skills in any of my advertising courses at Georgian College," she says. Similarly, Cognos, an Ottawa-based business intelligence and performance management solutions company, offers employees courses on "how to deal with and resolve conflict," and "adapting to change."
And when employees take in-house training together, it improves their ability to function as a team. Frank Ouyang, manager of technical solutions for localization services at Cognos, says, "the opportunity to interact with coworkers during in-house training has benefits beyond networking. I often find we are building and sharing business context with participants [who] work in different functions."
But it's the in-house management training that employers and employees feel is most beneficial. "We were observing that as people were required to take on supervisory roles, most had little prior experience," says John Wright, executive vice-president at advertising agency Wunderman, and "dean" of Toronto's Wunderman University.
Even employees with an advanced degree, such as Mr. Ouyang, who holds a Master's in computer science from Computing Technology Institute, China Academy in Beijing, was keen to take almost 30 in-house management courses including "reaching group agreement" and "leading successful meetings," so he could operate as an effective manager.
"The training courses are about soft skills, which were missing from my university course," Mr. Ouyang says.
Employees could take management training as part of an MBA program or through an external professional development organization, but Jerilyn Pattle, team manager, small business solutions at Ceridian in Winnipeg, argues in-house training is more applicable because it's tailored to her company and industry.
"In our 'manager essentials' course, we're all doing the same job from across the country and so it's easier to think of examples of how we're going to apply the learning."
However, don't assume inhouse training will be a fast-track to the executive suite. First of all, the opportunity to take career development courses is of secondary importance.
"We don't want managers to send employees to courses all over the place; the No. 1 priority is to get employees the skills they need to do their job well," says Ms. Turnbull-Smith.
Also, not all the employees interviewed say that in-house training advanced their careers. Myra Cridland was a senior manager, head office, retail bank division at Bank of Montreal, when she took a specialized three-year BMO-Dalhousie MBA at the $50-million Institute for Learning. Now the vice-president and chief administrative officer of private client group at BMO, she says, "without it [the training], I wouldn't be where I am today."
However, her training experience was unconventional in that it was actually an MBA degree.
Whereas Ceridian's Ms. Pattle, who has had three promotions in six years, says the Business of Administration diploma, the human resources diploma, and the certificate in management, all of which she took at Red River College in Winnipeg, played a more instrumental role in her promotions.
Wunderman's Ms. Kirwan, who was recently promoted, also reports "the courses didn't affect my review." It was her performance on the job that was the biggest factor.
Also when moving companies, the credibility of an employee's in-house training in the eyes of another employer is often tied to the reputation of the company the employee worked for, says Jeremy Miller, partner at LEAPJob, a Toronto-based recruiting company that specializes in sales professionals.
"If it's unbranded training, as a recruiter, you've got to figure out how good the level of knowledge is."
Source:thestarphoenix.com
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