We had a conversation with a prospect and the client was looking at getting a dashboard - so they could minimize usage of spreadsheets and provide to the end user details they needed, in the format the business users needed.
I was quite delighted to see an Indian organization so forward thinking and looking at adapting the way they work to adopt new ideas that new tools have made possible. And we at India are known to be late adopters? Not anymore!
However, one of the requirements increasingly asked for is “Ad-hoc analysis”. I just wonder if people use ad-hoc analysis cos they are not sure what they want?
Here’s my thoughts.
Dashboards provide an operational view to current state - so time window is very small. Dashboards should typically include key performance indicators (trend graphs or gauges) and list of records - like top n items etc. What is included as part of my dashboard is dependent on the work I do and the impact any business entity can possibly have on *my* business function.
Now, the intent of an ad-hoc analysis is usually identifying the “unknown” - a part of a process refining research. Or trying to identify a pattern. Would a small time window, more typical to operational dashboards, suit the needs of such analytical needs?
My two cents:
1. Identification of unknowns as part of analytics needs to be part of a larger data set - more suited for Strategic BI tools
2. Operationally, Identification of these unknowns needs to be maximized as part of performance metrics on the dashboard
Well, till such time - spreadsheets are here to stay, and so is “ad-hoc” analysis
Pete: BI initiatives are pretty notorious for failing, how does your company plan to avoid that failure
SS: Well, this has been a real pain point for a lot of people and it’s true, Yes, that’s true but it’s more to do with the way BI is perceived today and implemented. The hindsight approach, as we call it, needs to be supplemented with operational as well as predictive analytics. So just depending on historical data alone won’t help - you need to know what is happening right now to put the dots together.
Well to put it in perspective - It’s a typical case of insight on hindsight leading to nowhere…as I would put it.
… Listen to the podcast here : http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/2010/10/how_operation_bi_can_prevent_f.php
Enterprises of varying sizes still continue to depend on MIS reports under the guise of Business Intelligence. The so called BI department keeps churning out reports which I doubt the management ever takes notice of, not that they don’t want to but making sense out of those innumerable reports is like finding a needle in the haystack! So are the decision makers getting the right information?
Well, try this – you call up your customer to enquire about the new quotation that you recently sent and what you get to hear is a continuous ranting on missed deliveries for existing orders. The question is not about what the customer said but the possibility of losing the customer is of importance! Possibly, after the call you would pick up the new report sent by the BI folks where it says sales numbers have touched a record high.
Recently, while prospecting a Telco client I got to hear the most atrocious claim from a very reputed call center. “We provide a 360 degree reporting package” – when I enquired about what exactly they meant by that – pat came the reply – “we generate 360 reports”!! – I immediately knew why the client was looking at an Operational BI product.
The point is nobody has the time to skim through reports and waste valuable time in putting the dots together, rather have targeted Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) monitored, tracked and get notified of these business exceptions as early as possible so that you are prepared for what may come.
I guess it’s time for enterprises of all sizes to rethink on their enterprise BI strategy and establish a Report-Less – collaborative environment where its more proactive rather than reactive!.
Its a well accepted fact that spreadsheet is a tool which analysts, business executives and the rest of the crowd swear by. But did you ever realize that the data that’s in there is being manually fed.Here many things can go wrong 1) wrong data 2) uncensored data (no access control) 3) stale data 4) data of convenience!Strategist, specially at the top would be taking decisions based on information from spreadsheets which can either be or all of the above mentioned points.One may argue that their data is correct and up-to-date but in reality information gets biased as it travels up the hierarchy. And here we have key people in an organization taking important decisions based on them.Operational BI on the other could provide a framework which will directly feed data into the system from various sources and be able to present information which is unbiased and would not only help take better decisions but take informed decisions in near real time.I believe that Business Intelligence is critical in the decision making process but without a proper data source mechanism in place it could lead to results best avoided.
There has been a lot noise around traditional BI being a failed promise. In fact, Market Dynamics, a UK-based research organization, published a report on how Fortune 500 companies are losing millions of dollars in lost opportunities.Can it truly be attributed to traditional BI alone? Well, to answer that question one needs to comprehend the context in which BI is implemented.Traditionally, IS reports have been used by management executives to formulate strategies for their organization at a global level. Say, for instance, a pharmaceutical company would be more interested in identifying patterns to better understanding the usage of a particular drug for a region or occurrences of particular diseases in a geographic location.These, as you may well understand, are data which have been accumulated over a period of time, at times ranging in years. On the contrary, a downstream manufacturing company would benefit more from tracking whether their shipments are being delivered on time as that affects their business directly.As you can see, that the former approach falls more in the traditional BI category where the top brass would use the data to start an R&D initiative for a new drug or come up with a strategy to position a different drug for a particular market. The key thing to note is that to take such a decision you would require data with a wider time window, possibly a few months/years of data.In the latter scenario, the time window to respond to anomalies is extremely short and it directly impacts operations within as well as outside the organization to make decisions very quickly. As an example, a semiconductor company could be providing low budget components to mobile manufacturers. In today’s uncertain times, most of the manufacturers keep a very low inventory and are dependent on the downstream suppliers to deliver components in a timely manner as their assembly line is completely dependent on it.As you may be aware that a delay in shipment can trigger a flurry of activities affecting the line of business executives directly dealing with the customer, the finance department as a delay in shipment could affect the payment position, the planning department would need to rework on the next schedule and above all the customer would have to be informed about the delay so that they could possibly take necessary actions to handle their assembly line. This is what operational BI would help in solving: a short time window and people at the operations taking immediate decisions.Having said that, traditional BI is important, especially when identifying patterns to formulate strategies. On the other hand, for organizations to operate to the strategies, operational BI is better equipped to address it.In a nutshell: Operational BI
Alerting on predefined Key Performance Indicators based on thresholds
Shorter time window, more operational visibility
Quick response time
Information available to the right people at the right time
Transactional
Traditional BI
Helps in identifying patterns
Works on a wider time-window
More towards formulating strategies
Deals mainly with historic data
Key areas for success — in general:
Quality of Data
Indentifying organizational-specific KPIs
Aggregation of data from various sources
Data source format and integration
As you can see, for the latter scenario an approach based on traditional BI may not suffice as the time to react is very short whereas for the former scenario operational BI would not be effective as given the short time window, a strategist may not be able to conclude based on the data points available.
Problem:A BPO organization was having difficulty in identifying the root causes of their poor performance from a profitability perspective. The key concerns were not with customer satisfaction or quality of service. Every quarter they were losing millions despite the high customer satisfaction and with a distributed network of centers across different states the problem got even compounded.
Solution:The company hired a consulting firm to provide a solution to this problem as they could go out of business in another 6 months. The consulting firm identified some key KPIs at a high level which are most significant to any BPO organization: Quality Average Handle Time Customer SatisfactionTo monitor these they needed a tool which could provide them with real-time data which would then help them identify the problem areas. In this case they suggested an Operational BI tool as they wanted a Platform by which they could define the required KPIs (coarse grained as well as fine grained), to evaluate KPIs- they required real-time data and to trigger them based on thresholds, a workflow based tool to orchestrate processes and analyze them and above all have a consolidated dashboard which could give them the right information at the right time.The selection of a proper tool was critical as on an ongoing basis it would provide key insight to the organization even after they (consultants) left.
Gourangi – Operational BIAfter evaluating products in the operational BI space the consultants selected Gourangi as it offered the right set of features to track and resolve operational problems including a BPM suiteIdentifying the problem and resolutionVarious data points were tapped to define the three critical KPIs – Quality, AHT and Customer satisfaction using aggregated values across different centers. To monitor them they provided appropriate thresholds to each of the KPIs along with a Dashboard. They also defined a Workflow to handle anomalies in case the value exceeded the threshold.For a few weeks they monitored the KPIs and found out that the supervisors as well as the managers from most of the centers gave a lot of importance to customer satisfaction. These were more pronounced from the workflow analytics as for each AHT alert (high value) no corrective measures were taken to lower AHT and also the wait time for each task was considerably high.On the other hand customer satisfaction was high as the operators were spending more time with the customers but again quality of Service was low as rather than answering to the point and signing off quickly they entertained questions that were unrelated to the actual reason for the call. This also highlighted the fact that either the operators were not properly trained or they were not equipped to handle customers.The major cause though was still due to a High AHT value as the teams across the states were unable to handle higher volumes of calls on a per day basis. This led to an overall efficiency of 50% - attributing to overall losses.
Key Takeaways:The BPO organization re-aligned their operational and execution policies to keep a balance between the three key KPIs across their centers. Gourangi was implemented across various departments to keep a track of the ongoing activities and also to create a collaborative environment where key individuals from various hierarchies could take decisions by using information - at the right time and maintain the much needed balance between Customer Satisfaction, AHT and Quality.
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For many enterprises, strategic BI has played a key role in the overall decision making process. Where trends and patterns for various business entities were identified and company wide strategies were drawn. But lately, the enterprises are realizing that its NOT enough as Strategic BI heavily depends on data marts or a data warehouse, the reason being the latency. By the time data is put in the warehouse and information is extracted, critical time is lost leading to lost opportunities from the operational point of view. Say for instance, if there is a delay in delivery then its important to notify the Production unit, Finance, Line of business Representative as well as the customer. This has various advantages and most importantly the customer will appreciate it even more as they could reschedule their production plan and save a lot of time and money, it also helps maintain the relationship with the customer to curb customer attrition and also allow the internal folks to re-schedule or re-prioritize delivery.
This is where Operational BI helps enterprises to leverage the transactional data available, process it and alert respective entities within as well as outside the organization. It also by-passes the data warehouse route and minimizes the information turn-around time.
For more on Operational BI - read the feature Operational BI vs. Traditional BI - http://www.ebizq.net/topics/bi/features/11716.html
In most of the cases we see that SOA initiatives are driven by enterprise architects. The reason they are funded in the first place could be because SOA promises reduction in overall IT costs! From the tools that are available today we have Service Registries, Web Services Management,BPEL, ESBs and Governance based products to name a few. No doubt that they play a key role towards enabling SOA but do the business users really benefit from these tools? Say from a “Line of Business representative’s” perspective one could possibly use the Service specific information provided by the WSM tools such as Service Faults, SLA breaches for the service, Transactions Per Second…But they are all very service specific! what happens to the data that is passing through it? The data which is all important and is instrumental in running the enterprise itself!!! Do we see a convergence here where the concepts of Business Activity Monitoring and Web Services Management could be merged to benefit the Business Users and attribute to the overall profitability?
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