Is Mobile ready for you?

Posted on by

In the fourth quarter of 2010, Smartphone shipments (100.9 million) surpassed PC shipments (92.1 million) for the first time, with the European and US markets leading the way in both adoption and consumption. Whilst backroom debates on PC Vs Smartphone “life expectancy”, and “trend Vs fad”, will continue to rage in the back office and down the pub, the sheer volume is indicative of a growing demand for information on the move.

Early forays by Business Intelligence vendors into meeting the demand for business performance information at the birth of the smart phone boom were – and lets be critical – dissatisfactory. The infancy on the hardware, the swiftness of vendors to react and the uncharted users requirements at this stage, meant software solutions merely disseminated a skimmed version of the same information, without the necessary functionality to meet the business’ needs – we’ve all been sat in the pub and watched someone bring up their fifty-tab, five thousand row, Excel spreadsheet, and extol the virtues of their latest phone, only to realise it’s completely illegible, unusable and serves no practical business purpose. Well thankfully that’s changed, in a big way. The hardware’s more powerful; the UI streamlined; the connection improved; user requirements better defined through time, and this has enabled technology vendors to deliver tools for mobile users with functionality that PCs now can’t deliver.

Traditional reporting and ad-hoc query tools, such as IBM Cognos Go! Mobile and SAP BusinessObjects BI Mobile, now deliver the same instant information (reports, alerts, analysis and dashboards) as PCs, but anytime, anywhere and via touch screen, enabling faster time to decision. Alongside these, OLAP tools like SAP BusinessObjects Explorer enable powerful data exploration from the pocket.

All of these tools have now been integrated into their respective product platforms, can be delivered at a price that drives a return on investment and have simplified support, reducing the burden on the IT department.

Key Functionality:

  • Get critical reports & information on your mobile device
  • Take BI on the road and let any user get personalised information from their mobile.
  • Slice & Dice, OLAP analysis and critical alerts on the go.
  • Informed decisions – Your users can update information and trigger actions from mobile devices based on calls, SMS texts, or e-mail messages.

For more information please visit www.visualmetrics.co.uk or call +44 (0)870 7606467

Is it time to migrate?

Posted on by

The decision to migrate from an older release of a given software to a newer upgraded platform is often driven simply by the requirement to ensure on-going software support for business continuity. Whilst ensuring on-going support and maintenance is essential, it is by no means the only contributing factor, and to overlook those other drivers risks the opportunity to maximise their benefits: *including all previous releases.

1. Software Support: As discussed, ensuring on-going support and maintenance

2. Data Integration: The opportunity to introduce new data feeds, or streamline data integration.

3. Data Integrity: A chance to interrogate those factors which may decrease the data’s validity, and utilise new tools and techniques to ensure future improvements.

4. Functional Enhancements: What functionality or uses of the product could help drive more value from the investment and more value into the solution?

5. Product Enhancements: New tools included within the latest release that deliver benefit.

6. Compliance: Compliance factors often place requirements on organisations to ensure supported software, a particular technology, or specific outputs.

7. Standardisation: Standardising software across core applications can bring extra functionality, or decreased costs.

8. Scalability: The need to increase user access to the system, which the current release/platform has not been able to.

The focus on, and sponsorship of, the planned migration gifts the chance to increase the adoption of the application and ensure employees have the necessary skills to take advantage of it. To ensure a successful application migration at both a business and technical level, visualmetrics offers its visualmigration service. This service covers the entire scope of any migration programme: www.visualmetrics.co.uk/visualmigration

What are the quantitative benefits of a Performance Management Solution in the Housing Industry

Posted on by

Alongside the cost savings arising from information automation, the increased opportunity for cost of service delivery optimisation completes the quantitative business case. The focus has to be driven from improving income from assets while effectively controlling expenditure. Key areas for analysing returns include voids and arrears reduction, enhanced efficiency in all aspects of the repairs process, better control of income and expenditure, ensuring more effective capital and revenue expenditure, driving increased reserves/surplus, and where appropriate, better insight and control of financial management across the life-time of commercial developments. Creating a mutually-agreed ROI model between the supplier and the customer ensures that the performance management system not only delivers against the functional and technical requirements, but also that business adoption is properly promoted to support and drive business change, thereby ensuring the financial benefits are fully realised.

What are the qualitative benefits of a Performance Management Solution in the Housing Industry?

Posted on by

While a quantitative business case should support the decision to invest in enhanced performance management, many of the benefits of doing so cannot be measured individually. Instead, cross-sector reference data for these combined qualitative benefits provides assurance of their business benefits.

• Executive benefits include: enhanced tenancy engagement, streamlined and automated performance management processes, increased staff motivation, assurance of regulatory compliance for inspection, and alignment of strategic goals with operational measures, metrics and reporting;

• Operational benefits include: time-based analysis and trending, comparatives of plan versus actual, multi-dimensional analysis, real-time information alerting, mobile device deployment, user self-service, and drill to detail.

• Technical benefits include: enhanced data integrity, integration, automation, auditability, traceability and security – some of which are becoming quantitatively measurable as companies begin to understand better the value of information as a business asset.

What are the key business drivers behind the adoption of a performance management solution within Social Housing?

Posted on by

The drivers for enhancing performance management fall into four categories. First, we have executive drivers, key among which are tenancy engagement, government and regulatory compliance, executive command and control, monitoring finance and budgets, and delivering a single KPI-based view of performance linked to strategic objectives. While regulatory compliance and government initiatives do not dictate how a housing provider should measure business performance, they inevitably influence strategic goals at an executive level. These must be cascaded down to operations and a best-practice performance management system must flex and grow to support them.

The Affordable Housing Development initiative will create a need for companies to deliver insight from the top (executive) to the bottom (operational) of how long-term capital developments are performing. Equally, the change in regulatory compliance metrics that follows the disbanding and replacement of the Audit Commission and TSA could be weighted to place particular emphasis on any key area of operations to ensure cost-effective service delivery. In turn, this will affect a company’s ability to ensure operational reporting and executive strategies are aligned, if the system they currently use cannot adapt.

As many organisations in the housing sector look to consolidate or merge to deliver more cost-effective services, the challenge of delivering a single view of group performance – from operational to executive levels and from multiple people, processes and technologies, and leverage combined data assets – often drives a requirement to enhance performance management.

The second key area is the greater need for performance management solutions to deliver both operational and executive insight into core processes around housing operations, developments and repairs processes as well as finance and cashflow management. A pertinent example would be the changes in the housing benefits ceiling, where the need to monitor and manage tenant arrears will become acute in certain areas. Only by having the information to quickly respond to arrear trends, will housing providers be able to minimise the financial impact these changes could bring. 

Operational and functional drivers (information aggregation, user self-service, time-based analysis, financial comparatives, drill to detail, etc) and technical drivers (data integrity, integration, automation, traceability and security) are the final two areas that influence the need to enhance performance management. It is the lack of operational and functional capabilities, or the technical configuration of the current system, to deliver against either executive or business area drivers that result in the need to enhance reporting systems.

Information Drives Our Economy

Posted on by

Information is the world’s most plentiful, varied, and fast-changing commodity. It’s everywhere, and in enormous quantity. It takes many forms — from text and still and moving images to sound and numeric data — and it continues to evolve. Information drives our economy. It permeates our daily lives. And it is what keeps our staff awake at night, thinking of better ways to retrieve, organise, manage, and ensure access to this most vital of resources. The amount of information wrapped around a physical object increases the intrinsic value of the object. What we know about an object makes it more or less valuable to us.

Yet relevant information is a widely scattered commodity among our internal and external data structures. A few years ago we were only concerned about numeric information in our databases and textual information in our documents, today we need to manage our information in emails, blogs, instant messengers, videos and podcasts. How can business intelligence improve the whole information value chain? The answer requires a Business-led organisational, functional and technical network approach that integrates standalone applications and data resources to deliver timely intelligence across the enterprise from Strategy to Execution.

A focus on data quality, integrity, integration, automation, and dissemination are both business and IT drivers for BI projects. These are infrastructure activities, which are the critical tasks that need to be designed, developed and deployed before large scale BI applications can be driven out into business operations, allowing users to exploit the value of their business data as a basis for making informed decisions which will enhance operational efficiency and/or competitive edge.

Who really needs a Data Warehouse?

Posted on by

The rationale behind whether or not a Data Warehouse is required is often based upon the secondary benefits that the Business Intelligence Solution delivers – A Data Warehouse does not “decrease the speed at which decisions are made” or “deliver business insight”.

If the ultimate aim is to achieve the benefits of pervasive information across the organisation – giving all employees the right information, to make informed decisions – there are some simple criteria by which to test whether a Data Warehouse is necessary.

1. Combining data from multiple applications for reporting

Traditionally, organisations with multiple operational applications (Finance, Order Processing, CRM etc) have solved the problem of data integration through complex data extracts and manual data de-duplication. As data volumes have grown exponentially, these processes have struggled to keep pace and deliver against business’ demands. The Data Warehouse solves this by automating the process of data extract, transformation, integration and error resolution.

2. To reduce the IT burden and empower business users to answer questions

The Business Intelligence toolset enables users to build and schedule their own reports and queries without referring them to the IT department. The Data Warehouse removes the need for them to perform data extraction, manual integration and de-duplication exercises.

3. Time based analysis and long term information storage

Best-practice analysis necessitates the ability to report performance over time (year on year, Q1 vs Q2 etc). The functions of transactional systems often mean this data is not retained to avoid operational system lag, or because it is overwritten as operational facts change. The Data Warehouse enables this information to be retained for time based analysis. Equally, “slowly changing dimensions” can be preserved – for example, employment status: Full time, part time, contractor.

4. To alleviate the burden on transactional systems

Reporting applications perform notoriously intensive processes which often reduce the response times of operational applications. Automating the extraction of data from operational systems at a time which minimises operational system impacts and placing the burden of reporting on separate infrastructure (servers and disks) eliminates this problem. Server technologies employed to produce quick reporting solutions may also hinder transactional application performance, such as star schemas bit-mapped indexing. Keeping these separate mitigates this.

5. Data cleansing and Meta Data management

The processes, by which data is extracted, transformed and loaded (ETL) into the Data Warehouse, and the technical tools that report on error corrections and ensure consistent business terminology, deliver one trusted repository for business information.

6. To streamline future reporting application delivery

The Data Warehouse streamlines the introduction of new data feeds, and allows for multiple “views” or universes to be created for specific business communities.

7. Information on demand

Web delivery driven information “On-Demand” allows organisations to extend the reach of reporting quickly, safely and efficiently.

The Age of Data Exploitation

Posted on by

How is Business Intelligence (BI) evolving in the current UK economic climate, given that the BI market has now been established for 15+ years ? Well, there are several trends which are becoming apparent.

Firstly, a business looking to acquire these types of “Information Insight” applications, are more knowledgeable about their business operational and functional requirements, (the application of technology), rather than just being software product (technology) driven. Consequently, we have a more informed and astute buying community. They know what they want, and why they want it. As a result of this, businesses are clearly looking more closely at 1 business partner, to assist them in the end-to-end project delivery. What this means in basic terms, is shared ownership & risk, and an explicit awareness of what they require to deliver for business, operational and technical benefits. As was heard recently expounded at a major Business Intelligence vendor event, “a partner for life” or “one throat to choke”!

Secondly, there is a greater degree of understanding that Data is an enormously valuable business asset that needs both Executive management, as well as business exploitation. Many FTSE companies are now appointing Executives to the role of “Data Asset Management”, and though this is not an explicit part of the Executive remit of a mid-sized company, the understanding of “Data as an Asset” is now clearly and knowledgeably on the agenda of all Executive Boards. To this end, the whole focus on Data Quality, Data Integrity, and the Automation of Data Delivery, “The Information Supply Chain” to end users, are critical to BI projects fulfilling their project promises. However, this is less knowledgeably advanced in a business context, and there was a recent quote from a former HR head of Hewlett Packard who said; “if Hewlett Packard knew half of what if knows, it would be twice the size”. The point here, is that they were abundantly data rich, but information poor, clearly a cliché we have heard in this sector for several years. Only now do businesses have the Executive authority, business knowledge, available software products, and potential partners who can leverage the latent value of all these assets for true business advantage.

The “Age of Data Exploitation” is here, the winners in business will grasp this opportunity, but those who don’t will be business laggards, at best.

Master Data Management and Information Governance Initiatives: What you need to know

Posted on by

“as organisations recognise that data integration activities must provide more than simply data delivery – they must ensure the quality of the data being delivered enhances the value of data integration investments.”

Organisations of all sizes and in all industries are recognising the importance of high-quality data and the critical role of data quality in information governance and stewardship driven by broader enterprise information management initiatives. As a result, their interest in the role of tools and technology for data quality improvement continues to grow.

Data quality functionality is also being recognised as a fundamental component of offerings in many related software markets, such as Data Integration tools, Master Data Management (MDM) solutions and Business Intelligence solutions & platforms. The demand for data quality tools continues to see significant growth, and this is a clear indication of the convergence of data profiling, data-cleansing operations and domain-specific management.

A macro trend of convergence of the data quality tools market and the related market for data integration tools continues, as organisations recognise that data integration activities must provide more than simply data delivery – they must ensure the quality of the data being delivered enhances the value of data integration investments. Integration of these capabilities into a single architecture and product – specifically, integration at the metadata level, for example, a single unified metadata repository or the ability to apply findings from one toolset to create inference outcomes in another.

A significant trend in this market is the continued expansion of the tools’ capabilities beyond the basic data quality operations of parsing, standardisation and matching of structured data assets in a narrow set of data domains (for example, customer data only). Vendors are delivering technology with a focus on data quality analysis, pervasive deployment of data quality controls, ongoing data quality monitoring and flexibility to address a range of data subject areas, with advanced techniques. Data quality assessment and monitoring technology is coming to the fore. Innovation in the data quality tools market relates to technology to help organisations measure and monitor levels of data quality, focusing on domain-agnostic data quality services, based on a centrally managed set of business rules.

Why Performance Management is Failing to Deliver

Posted on by

“Performance Management is a Business Solution to a Business Problem, and should be business-led, sponsored and governed to ensure adoption, mitigate risk and maximise return.”

If delivering Performance Management applications was as simple as buying the software product and installing it, then everyone would be driving increased business value from operational data. Sadly it’s not, they are not.

The promise of Performance Management is an integrated and unified view of data across the organisation, automated and aggregated to meet the requirements of users, enabling operational excellence and delivering competitive advantage. Yet despite proven software and clear business benefit Performance Management is still in the “Early Adopter” phase within industry.

So why are organisations investing in quick win solutions such as Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting applications, and risking operational effectiveness, rather than unifying these silos of information and mining their combined value?

The simple answer; “Cost, Value, Risk”. The investment required to deliver a Performance Management project is proportional to organisation size and thus unilaterally high. Effective project “Due Diligence” to reconcile a business requirement and an IT solution becomes intractable when project governance, project scope, operational engagement between the business & IT, process improvement, user adoption, data integration and data quality are all combined. The potential pitfalls mean an in-house solution carries too high a risk, and outsourcing carries too great a cost.

So how should organisations reconcile these difficulties and deliver successful projects? Firstly the software used should form around 25% of the project consideration, as such its selection should be based on requirements set out in a project roadmap, rather than a product predisposition.

Secondly Performance Management is a “Business Solution to a Business Problem”, and should be business-led, sponsored and governed. A thorough “Discover & Reveal” phase should set out challenges, solution, and benefits, against which project scope can be controlled. ROI modeling should ascertain the suitable balance between investment and benefit. A pilot model or phased approach mitigates the risk of biting off more than you can chew.

Engaging with a third party will also help leverage benefits and decrease Time to delivery, through ROI modeling expenditure can be justified and rationalised. Their industry expertise and subject based knowledge, along with value-add software, pre-developed solutions and integration platforms can mitigate risk, optimise ROI and bring unanticipated benefits.

To win in the current economic climate we all need to become “Data Driven Businesses”, effective at aligning “Strategic Goals and Process Improvement” by integrating “Thinking & Doing”. If these ideas resonate with your business experience, then visualmetrics is a viable business partner for your next Performance Management project.