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| Management Briefings
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Perfecting performance: Tom Griggs, Parson Consulting (September 2008)
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In recent years, the concept of corporate performance management (CPM) and the adoption of performance technologies has
garnered substantial attention, with mixed reviews.
No-one disputes the potential benefit of performance management as these kinds of initiatives continue to rank number one in
priority and are a high area of importance for executives. In fact, a 2006 AMR Research report predicted that CPM spending
would reach nearly $23 billion – with BI spending increasing by 10% and the dashboard/scorecard segment by 26%.
Nevertheless, even with all the investment, the pay-off still remains elusive for many. A high percentage of companies are not
achieving their desired results and subsequently falling short of their performance goals.
Why is it that so many CPM initiatives fall short? Is it the strategy itself or the execution?
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Green business intelligence: Howard Pull, Conchango (May 2008)
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Picture the possibilities… Sales soar at a UK supermarket when ethically minded customers
flock to its newly improved e-commerce site which allows them to order their usual basket of
groceries, and then rank and substitute products based on their green credentials. With a
click of a button they substitute their usual basket of products with a rival brand with a lower
carbon footprint, whose packaging is bio-degradable or used the least energy in its
production.
Elsewhere, a high-street chain announces a ‘green initiative’ of energy and emission savings to
the stock market, but then finds the data it uses to support this fails to meet the industry-defined
GRI reporting standards. The company defends the initiative as a success – but its share price
suffers.
These scenarios illustrate the power of ‘green’ business intelligence and the kind of business
opportunities and risks it presents.
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Navigating CPM's new landscape: Simon Bell, Opal Wave Solutions (April 2008)
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There have been many changes in the corporate performance management (CPM)
software market over recent years. We have seen vendors delivering greater
functionality, ease-of-use and value, and finally seen them step up to the mark with the
delivery of platforms that are actually capable of fulfilling their marketing promises.
Last year, however, saw something different. A flurry of acquisitions –including both
some long-anticipated deals and some surprises – brought a complete and rapid change
in the market structure.
Hyperion was acquired by Oracle, Cartesis and ALG were acquired by Business Objects,
which was then taken over by SAP. SAP itself had only just bought OutlookSoft to add to
its earlier Pilot purchase. The last of the big players was snapped up when IBM took
over Cognos which had itself just bought Applix.
All this left the market in confusion with a completely new triumvirate of big vendors trying to convince customers that
they knew what they were doing but that each of their competitors was in disarray!
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Silencing the sceptics: CJ Cox, BearingPoint (January 2008)
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For many years, corporations have sought the holy grail of increasing their competitive advantage and profit by harnessing
their corporate data as a strategic and tactical tool. As a result, a growing number of companies have invested in a new
generation of business intelligence solutions that gather, provide secured access to and analyse data.
While these solutions can be powerful tools that save money, raise performance and meet the needs of information workers
across an organisation, many companies find they are not receiving the return on investment (ROI) they had hoped for. Much
of the disappointment in BI performance can be traced to user dissatisfaction, which results in employees either not using the
new systems well or, worse, not using them at all.
The good news is that this problem can be addressed by creative companies through a mix of technical improvements, change
management, communications and training programmes – helping them get what they hoped for from BI.
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Over-engineered and under-used: Roger Freeston, Medley (November 2007)
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The use of data warehouses to support a company’s customer relationship management (CRM)
strategy is now becoming increasingly commonplace. These solutions are typically seen as the
cornerstone for the success of the CRM initiative.
However, if this is the case, why – when looking at organisations that have recently completed
a CRM initiative – do we find that the CRM data warehouse (CRM DW) is often under-used,
misunderstood and is failing to deliver the expected benefits to the business?
To understand this, we must first take a step back and consider what the rational for the CRM
DW was in the first place.
The overall objective is to provide business intelligence to achieve the company’s objectives in
attracting, servicing and retaining customers.
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Who's in charge?: Darron Chapman, TFPL Recruitment (September 2007)
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Information and communications technology (ICT) plays an important role in organisations. It enables us to communicate
constantly, collaborate virtually, compete globally, share information widely across geographic boundaries and time zones, and
operate at a speed earlier generations could only imagine.
As organisations look to realise the promised return on investment in ICT, it has become apparent that the value lies in the
content it carries and not in the technology itself. So ICT has helped bring information centre stage as a key resource, a
commodity and a power base.
Excellence in information management (IM) now looks set to become a major organisational target. Like total quality
management (TQM), business process re-engineering (BPR) and knowledge management (KM), some organisations are
embracing the concept with early-adopter zeal, some protest that it is just a fad, while others point out that it is something they
have been doing for a long time.
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Future of BI may not be BI...: Gerry Brown, Bloor Research (June 2007)
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Many BI vendors and industry commentators have been promoting the idea of ‘BI 2.0’. This new
generation of BI software is easy to use, fast and flexible. It is said that BI 2.0 will rocket user
adoption from its 25% or so penetration level of business users to 85%-plus. BI will then be truly
‘pervasive’.
This is an attractive vision from a vendor perspective. But from a buyer perspective, it raises a
number of issues.
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Turning information into intelligence: Eleanor Windsor, Osborne Clarke (May 07)
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Business intelligence (BI) is often associated with expensive and complex IT systems. Although
these systems impress with their ability to gather data and management information, it is the
mixing of these reporting tools with the all-important human element that can really help to
improve business decision making.
BI is not just about data collection and data presentation – and it should not be sited or seen as
part of either IT or marketing.
To really work, it needs to be a function in its own right. It needs to be focused on drawing
together information from across the business, analysing and interpreting that data, and
communicating that analysis with the appropriate recommendations to the right people within
the business at the right time.
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Blame the governance: Rupert Cavendish, Iconium (March 2007)
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The world of business is constantly evolving. As organisations are increasingly subject to legislation and need to build more
complex and time-critical forms of risk management – driven by the FSA, Sarbanes-Oxley, IT security, etc – so the number of
policies, standards and procedures needed to inform and obligate staff grows larger.
Unfortunately, more policies does not mean more understanding, as staff will be even less able to find the things that relate to
them and their job, that are most immediately relevant to the projects they are working on today.
The increasing weight of legal requirements such as FSA regulation, the Freedom of Information Act, data protection, privacy
law, information security and health & safety legislation requires organisations not only to comply, but also set up audit trails to
demonstrate their compliance. Organisations also need to establish and use procedures which allow them to operate efficiently
in all departments and locations, in line with internal or external standards.
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The new information professionals: S Manwani, Henley Management College (Jan 07)
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People know only too well the importance of information in competing in a global economy or protecting our society against
terrorism. This information comes in many different forms from a variety of sources and has to be validated, consolidated and
presented in order to take the right decisions.
We also appreciate that this information has to be controlled and secure so that it is not misused. The public and private sectors
have these common challenges even though their ultimate use of information is different in regards to organisational aims.
This link is illustrated by two case studies detailed below – the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and Yell UK. Both Steve
Farquharson, group information management director at MPS, and Mike Fishwick, head of customer information management
at Yell, have recognised that information needs to take precedence over technology in setting and implementing policies.
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Enterprise insight: Maggie Scott, Detica (November 2006)
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Data warehousing; customer insight; business intelligence; the ‘single view’ of the customer – the promise of these capabilities
is driving increasing investment in insight across organisations, suggesting an end-game in which data can be gathered from
disparate sources across the organisation, collected, integrated and transformed to create a coherent source of information. As
a result, decision making across the organisation should be both more efficient and effective.
The term ‘enterprise insight’ is often used to encompass these capabilities, bringing a range of benefits.
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Icing on the cake...or staple diet?: Michael Collins and David Willis (Sept 06)
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In the information age, with the internet providing us with news and comment from all
corners of the world, data exploitation has been elevated from its traditional place in the
marketing mix to become a 21st century corporate necessity. In essence, businesses
have a wealth of data but a shortage of actionable information, and delivering the right
information to the right people at the right time has never been so critical to an
organisation’s success. The integration of data and its packaging up in a form that business managers can
comprehend and action is what bridges the information void. Technological advances
mean it is now within any organisation’s capability to exploit its data. Graphical data
integration tools can increase productivity, with application definitions managed via
metadata, and ongoing support no longer presents such a headache to IT heads.
Similarly, intuitive data-quality tools can quickly identify issues th
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A balanced information diet: Bob Barnes, Conchango (August 2006)
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Companies are realising that the provision of information to internal and external stakeholders is
vital, but they often lack a clear approach for delivering it. Consumers of information often find it
difficult to obtain the correct information and sometimes receive conflicting information from
different parts of the same company.
So what is the answer? To draw a parallel, people need both food and water to thrive. But not
just any food – what the meal is made up of is important. People may want a complete meal,
not the uncooked ingredients as they might not have the time or skills to prepare them.
Consider a company and its need to be fed by information. This structured information is like
‘drink’ – you need it regularly and it must be clean and of good quality. A lot of companies do
realise the importance of this and have their handling of this data well under control. However,
their ‘unstructured’ information – documents, emails, etc – is like food. Again this should be of good quality, clean, wellpresented
and hopefully a pleasure to consume. However when it comes to how some companies serve up their unstructured
information, it is often an unappealing stew.
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BI: the thinking executive's way to get ahead: Jake Liddell, Charteris (July 06)
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In the renowned movie ‘2001: a Space Odyssey’, the on-board thinking computer, HAL, is a
great friend in a crisis until he actually causes one. Confronted for the first time with the threat
of disconnection, HAL immediately sets out to kill every human on the spaceship – and nearly
succeeds.
Today, businesses that really want to get ahead are confronted by the need to develop their
own computer-based intelligence – business intelligence. In practice, business intelligence is
not ‘intelligence’ as such – just as HAL himself perhaps wasn’t really so intelligent because he
didn’t know he could be switched back on again. Instead of trying to simulate genuine human
intelligence, BI provides what is essentially a distillation of information. This distillation allows
people to apply their own decision-forming where and when it matters, rather than taking up
valuable thinking time in mundane sorting, sifting and calculating.
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Quality concerns: Sarah Burnett, Butler Group (June 2006)
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Business intelligence (BI) has become an important organisational capability in today’s
information age. Driven by the need to make sense of the massive amounts of data that they
have at their disposal, organisations have turned to BI to convert raw data collected from daily
operations and transactions into useful intelligence to support business decision making.
Their efforts, however, continue to be hampered by data quality and integrity issues. In some
organisations source-data quality is often inconsistent at best. So there’s a need to understand
how we go about making poor-quality data better, and dirty and inconsistent data clean.
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Reality check list: Pete Singleton, Analitica (April 2006)
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If you believe the analysts, business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance
management (CPM) are set to top the list of IT priorities in the coming years – and there
is no doubt that successful implementations have reaped huge rewards, for all sizes of
organisations. It is one area of business systems that can be equally rewarding to the
multinational blue-chip as well as the £100 million turnover business, and it spans a
range of industry sectors and requirements.
A good BI system should provide visibility and clarity of decision making to the business.
Executives should have simple navigation points to view performance, dig into detail and
make decisions. Analysts should have ‘speed of thought’ capabilities to analyse, answer questions and predict and
model. Operational staff should have clear and defined information that aid in their jobs.
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Too much of a good thing?: Eduard Gracia, Deloitte MCS (February 2006)
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For the last decade or so, offshoring has been the most remarkable trend observed in the IT arena. Put simply, offshoring
is the logical consequence of market globalisation, driven by the emergence of technologies that enable companies to
provide remotely services that until very recently could only be supplied from the location where the end customer sat.
Offshoring has already left behind its heroic days and is rapidly becoming a widespread practice. Nevertheless (or
perhaps precisely because it is becoming standard practice for many service types, such as call centres or basic IT
development), many companies assume it is easy to extend the concept to other business processes – and learn the
hard way that it is not.
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Aligning BI with performance management: Shoaib Patel/Jon Hancock, Axon (Nov 05)
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To be competitive in today’s world, organisations must manage and reduce their operational costs to drive operational
efficiencies. They need to understand and target particular customer segments with appropriate and profitable products
and services. Business intelligence (BI) is about managing business information and turning intelligence into knowledge
– to help executives make the right business decisions at the right time and effectively deploy strategy. Information is
typically obtained about customer needs, customer decision-making processes, the competition, conditions in the
industry, and general economic, technological and cultural trends. However, the reality is that while some organisations
have made a success out of BI, others have implemented BI systems that merely function as an operational reporting
tool disconnected from the organisation’s strategy. Integrating BI with performance management can help to ensure
successful strategy deployment and increase competitive advantage. Research shows that 80% of strategic failings are
due to a failure in deployment rather than the analysis and determination stages.
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Benefiting from BI: Andy Mulholland, Capgemini (September 2005)
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Business intelligence, or BI, has been a hot topic recently – though it is not so easy to define what is meant by the term.
Often BI has been defined by the choice of a specialist product from one of the many small vendors who describe
themselves as being in this market. But now Oracle, SAP and Siebel have all stepped forward offering ‘integrated’
business intelligence within their own product suites. Microsoft too describes business intelligence as being a key part
of collaboration. And industry analysts say it is an essential part of many market requirements to solve common issues
– ranging from business performance improvement, or BPI, to Sarbanes-Oxley and specific vertical requirements such
as Basel II in the financial sector. In fact there are a number of drivers as to why business intelligence is needed.
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Making it stick: Bettina Pickering, PA Consulting (August 2005)
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Most companies have experienced the following scenario: a great deal of work has gone
into the design and implementation of a new system and new or changed processes, the
implementation was successful and the system and new processes have gone live on
time. However, after a while, this perfect picture starts to break up: users insist they
need different reports or additional non-standard functionality. They continue to use other
programs such as Excel and Access to build their own reports and databases, in
addition to those in the main system. Staff revert back to the old processes fully or in
part or they create their own deviations from the new process.
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BI extends reach to mid-market: Keith Birch, Touchstone (April 2005)
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We are more than 10 years into the business intelligence revolution, and the UK’s mid-market
organisations have yet to benefit from this technology. However, market
consolidation and the arrival of Microsoft onto the scene have shaken up the sector. The
only remaining obstacle to the mid-market enjoying the benefits that BI can bring is
recognising that, despite the plethora of acronyms, it’s all about reporting.
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What's the story behind the numbers?: Chris Turner, StrataBridge (February 2005)
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Many businesses today are facing a paradox. The promise of wall-to-wall ERP systems providing real-time information
has resulted for some in a sea of data – often with no better understanding of what it is indicating or, worse still, some
critical signals masked by the noise. The problem is compounded by the constant and simultaneous pursuit of growth
and cost improvement and the consequential change that comes with this.
And for most companies, this process isn’t likely to slow, it’s more likely to accelerate. Mergers, acquisitions,
regionalisation, globalisation, more and faster innovation: with the potential value comes potential complexity and
certainly a heap more data. If organisations are to make sense against this changing backdrop, they need to
understand the story behind the numbers.
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Optimised prediction: Eddie Short and Brian Whitmore, Capgemini (February 2005)
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Business intelligence has significantly matured in recent years due to the deployment of enterprise BI strategies and
products. The BI landscape has changed dramatically: from reporting just being viewed as an add-on to a business
system, to BI becoming an organised and centralised management information solution. Large-scale enterprise BI
deployments are rolled out to many hundreds of users across organisations with a mixture of success and failure.
Successes have been achieved where the information needs of the business and the actual usage of the BI tools are
taken into consideration. However, this is not often the case and giving everyone within a large organisation access to a
fully featured ad hoc reporting tool has not proven to be the smartest move. The debate over which BI technology
platform to use has moved on from a simple ‘features and benefits’ comparison.
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