Many happy returns

Organisations are swamped with data. Turning that data into valuable information that can further the aims of the business is a major challenge. The situation is made more complicated by regulations that determine how that data should be used and stored.

A Computing roundtable debate, organised in association with Cognos, gathered a panel of experts and IT decision-makers to discuss the best practice in maximising the return on information. They came up with this series of recommendations for IT managers to put into practice.

Information is your corporate memory – and it comes from people

Organisations are made up of information. Every detail of the company’s transactions and decisions builds up into a mountain of data that contains the combined knowledge of how to do business.

In the past, business people have not understood the potential of business data, and IT people have not understood the business. But that has changed.

‘We have created a kind of a hybrid role. We are outside of technology, between technology and the business,’ said Nigel Watson, European director of business systems for travel services group Travelport Business.

By providing useful data and ensuring its accuracy, IT professionals can distribute capability around the business. But senior managers are not going to analyse data on a screen, so the organisation has to give them tools to supplement their human intelligence with business intelligence, says Watson.

‘We must train our users and make sure we have clear definitions around the data,’ he said.

‘We have metrics analysts in the key functional areas such as finance, sales and operations. They provide us with requirements and we build the canned reports – then they interpret what we give back to them.’

There is no single way to get users on board. One panel member worked on a project where lawyers were persuaded to record their business processes by setting specific points within their workflow where they had to record information.

‘People want to keep things to themselves because they believe it makes them important,’ said Tony Kitson, director of customer experience at design services firm Statis.

‘We try to do a cultural shift, from “knowledge is power” to “knowledge is being respected”.’

Make the information useful, and people will use it

It is vital to provide information that is actionable, and that can be used directly. Placing knowledge tools in the business process is a great goal, but it requires a lot of understanding.

‘We are looking at making reports call-able as web services we can embed within the process, to help make decisions,’ said Travelport’s Watson.

Most of the panel liked the idea of a corporate ‘dashboard’.

‘In some very large organisations, the chief executive projects up his dashboard on the wall to get a quick view of what is going on,’ said Graham Walter, European vice president for Cognos.

‘Does it reflect all the complexities of that business? No. Does it give him a view instantly of something that is going right or wrong within his organisation? I think it does.’

This approach can be spread wider. Aircraft engine company Rolls Royce has created a set of 16 key performance indicators, which each divisional manager has to account for to the chief executive, says Ovum analyst Mike Davis.

‘The divisional managers used to come into the monthly meeting and present their own pieces of paper,’ he said. ‘

The chief executive said: “Next month we are going to display live data from the system and you are going to account for each amount or figure.”

‘It took them the best part of a year to get that in place, but everything now works out of the single SAP system.’

Keep your primary data primary – do not do work in Excel

One barrier remains between IT and the rest of the company: those outside IT do not understand the difference between primary and secondary data.

‘If you retrieve a report from a database, you have primary data. As soon as you run a spreadsheet exercise on it, you change it, it is no longer primary, it is secondary data or, even worse, tertiary data,’ said Steve Messenger, local change manager at news agency Reuters. ‘Tertiary data? Bin it. It’s not good enough.’

James Walker, manager of messaging and collaboration at chemicals firm BASF, related the tale of one company.

‘This was a precious metal handling environment in South Africa, with a turnover in the region of $1bn a year – and the whole place was run on a spreadsheet,’ he said.

‘When they dragged them kicking and screaming into the corporate system, they were $40m out. It almost shut the plant down.’

The panel stressed the message: do not use Excel spreadsheets as a source for data.

‘If it is business-critical, it should not be in an Excel spreadsheet,’ said Davis.

Presentation is important

There is no point doing work with the data if it is too complex to use, say our experts.

‘It is about making sure the information is presented in context and in the richest form possible,’ said Travelport’s Watson.

One way Watson achieves this is to take data about the hotel rooms his company sells, and present it on a map.

‘If you present that information just in a table it is not as rich as if you present it on a map,’ he said, explaining that the map could show information such as hotels in the centre of Paris filling up while those near the airport are empty.

The power of graphics shows up in surprising places.

‘In the latest version of iTunes Apple has created a thing which it calls Cover Flow Viewer, where you display all the album covers in a series across the top of the screen and scroll across them,’ said Ovum’s Davis.

Increased requirements: more work, or an opportunity?

There are increasing demands, both from governments and regulatory bodies, for producing auditable information to satisfy the requirements of laws such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sox).

But our experts view this is not as a threat but as an opportunity, a way of opening discussion about a firm’s data policies and practices.

There is an opportunity to suggest a business process improvement, and then to ask the auditors if it is enough to be Sox-compliant, says Rana Ghosh-Roy, information management director at Capgemini.

‘When consultants such as PwC or Deloitte identify the data which is missing to be Sox compliant, we say: why don’t you do it another way? If they come back and say it is not compliant, we can tweak the process to make sure the data is collected,’ he said.

‘I think this is why we are seeing most of the product vendors embedding some kind of workflow. They are saying the business process is one of the key things, not just data collection.’

As the volume goes up, you have to cluster

Data volumes continue to increase as business systems become more complex.

‘In the UK financial markets, you can trade on 4.5 million different shares a day, and the market is updating, in a busy period, about 80,000 times a second,’ said Reuters’ Messenger. ‘That is 80,000 transactions a second.’

New types of data also need to be handled, with unstructured data such as email, phone calls and instant messages expanding even faster than structured data.

‘A lot of people do not realise that unstructured data is also their primary source of data, in that it is the first source,’ said Messenger.

‘It has not been altered or manipulated in any way.’

All the panel have large databases, but their workload depends less on the amount of data as on other factors, such as the rate the data is changing, the requirements on how it should be handled, and the demand for processed reports.

‘The databases we are using were designed to hold a terabyte. We are using them at the petabyte level and now the exabyte level,’ said Ovum’s Davis.

‘US telecoms firm BellSouth had a very big issue, in that its database would not scale to do what the company wanted.

‘The firm had to break it down and cluster it into small pieces, because that was the only way to get the right performance.’

But there are times when data just grows of its own accord.

‘One of my secretaries was complaining how long it took to edit the minutes of the change management meeting,’ said one delegate.

‘Each meeting, she’d take the same document, change it, save it under a new name.

‘A year’s worth of weekly meetings were preserved in the change history of that document. The fact that it’s the change management minutes is kind of ironic.’

What the experts say

There is a difference between where the data lies and how it is presented to a user in the form of reports. The responsibility to ensure that data is safe, secure and of high integrity – that is fundamental to IT work.

Graham Walter, vice president, Cognos Europe

With each cycle of technology we are going to get extra metadata added to each of the pieces of data that we are storing. When you migrate from one system or archive to another, you are going to add more stuff to it. We have no answers to this – but we need to be aware of it.

Mike Davis, senior analyst, Ovum

The value of your data depends on what you do. If you’re making bread, it probably doesn’t matter so much.

Nick Bettes, IT director, g4s

The amount of data is increasing every single second we sit here, and the only way we’re going to be able to deal with it is to clusterise it.

Steve Messenger, local change manager, Reuters

Some software doesn’t help – it silos information. Various packages out there have a sales view, and a finance view, but higher up you deal with ambiguity and granularity.

Kim Batcheler, global IS director, Alliance One International

I think knowledge management is coming back again. We have seen lots of requests coming out asking for knowledge management.

Rana Ghosh-Roy, information management director, Capgemini

In each project, we make sure the information we provide is actionable, so that we’re crystal clear on what are the business questions the user is going to try and answer

Nigel Watson, director, business systems, Europe, Travelport Business Group
The validity of the calculations in any spreadsheet is highly subjective, so any audit process should throw them out straightaway.

James Walker, manager – messaging and collaboration, BASF

There are resources of information across the business, we have to provide some form of consolidation to get to them.

Ian Aitchison, product manager, Touchpaper Software

If you understand the processes driving your operation, it is much easier to capture the sort of the information you require. I believe knowledge management is back on the agenda.

Paul McLaughlin, IT manager, University of York

Don’t forget the human side. It is the integration of people and process and technology – an old cliche, but a true one.

Tony Kitson, director customer experience, Statis

For better or worse humans have always been the ultimate information filters, haven’t they?

Andy Owen, corporate network services manager, IDT

I respect human intelligence, and we are definitely not trying to replace it. We are trying to supplement it. Information actually brings value.

Ray Titcombe, IT manager, National Foundation for Education Research

Further reading:

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