Systems of enlightenment

The Lawn Tennis Association uses BI and CRM systems from Oracle to measure business performance

Research company Gartner earlier last year warned that most organisations do not have the information, processes and tools in place to make informed business decisions due to underinvestment in information infrastructure. It urged greater investment in knowledge management applications to tackle this problem.

Knowledge management platforms encompass a range of different types of software, from business intelligence (BI), analytics and data warehousing tools to collaboration and sharing platforms from big vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, which have recently integrated Web 2.0 elements such as wikis, social networking, collaboration and blogs into their products.

Business intelligence
BI applications are widely used to give organisations a better understanding of their business operations and how to improve them through detailed analysis of resource and performance information stored in data repositories.

The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) uses Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI), closely integrated with version 8.1.1 of the Oracle Siebel CRM platform, to assess and report on performance targets and measure business success, for example, deciding where additional support and resources need to be allocated, particularly during the fortnight of the Wimbledon Championships.

Information extracted from the CRM system, which contains data on 270,000 LTA members, players, coaches, clubs, schools, parks, tournaments, events and matches as well as player ratings and rankings, is fed into the LTA web site and presented in dashboards that provide management with a snapshot of parts of the business, allowing them to accurately identify opportunities to improve the way the business operates.

“It is vital technology for the organisation and provides the intelligence needed to help the organisation manage people relationships in tennis,” says Will Solomon, LTA information systems manager. “Likewise, we can identify where a campaign for a programme is adding a significant benefit and make the approach more widespread.”

For the moment, the LTA’s CRM system captures player performance and match statistics for its own use. But there are plans to expand the BI element by adding videos of the player’s training and matches for further performance analysis at a later date which will also be passed to LTA members themselves.

“For example, we are capturing videos from Hawk-Eye, a system that visually tracks the path of the tennis ball, to assess players’ performance,” says Solomon. “We also capture detailed match statistics for some performance players, which we are integrating into OBI, and which we will pass to the web site for the players and teams to review and analyse.”

Next-generation portals
Portals that provide access to data are an equally important part of the knowledge management process. They are often included as a single element in much larger enterprise web infrastructure platforms such as IBM’s WebSphere or Microsoft’s SharePoint, though standalone products such as BEA’s WebLogic Portal can be used to create similar user interfaces into an organisation’s data repositories.

Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for collaboration and social software at Gartner, says that traditional portals that became bogged down in heavy development frameworks are being replaced by applets embedded into other applications that provide more customised methods of data extraction.

“The next generation [of portals] is looking at mashups and more lightweight environments where users can pull together links and RSS feeds within the application interface,” he says. “The difference here is that it is being driven by end users rather than software developers.”

Analytics applets can also be integrated into application mashups, for example allowing customised data queries, scores, calculations, metrics and graphs to be embedded into application GUIs and displayed in real time.

When faced with the need to consolidate several information repositories a few years ago, Altitude Software, a global developer of contact centre platforms with offices in the UK and abroad, first considered implementing a traditional portal framework but decided to expand on the TWiki open-source wiki product that its technical documentation department had used previously.

With minimum investment, Altitude has been able to use the same platform to provide a more transparent view of its business activities to its own employees, and promote more effective collaboration, information and idea sharing among its departments.

Mann says he has also encountered pharmaceutical and research companies whose staff use collaborative environments and virtual classrooms to compare notes on their studies, and even in pre-sales environments where colleagues ask advice on very technical content. The Oracle Siebel CRM 8.1.1 platform used by the LTA also contains an integrated interactive training tool to help improve user knowledge.

“It’s going into the next phase now, where it is not so much a feature of a larger package, but a style of interaction based on collaboration, wikis, document sharing and blogs, like that found in CMS products such as EMC Documentum,” he says.

Social networking elements play their part in today’s knowledge management platforms. Global financial services giant Deloitte, for example, has provided a social networking environment to its 45,000 employees based in the US and India since 2007.

The network is based on Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and allows users to share personal and professional data, form their own groups, indicate presence, deliver search tools, attach documents such as CVs and pictures, share links to other content, and blog. Evidence suggests that individuals are using the system to increase their own visibility within the organisation and create a personal brand, while Deloitte believes it has also boosted the productivity of its project teams, improved idea generation and helped retain and recruit staff.

Data warehousing
It is just this type of Web 2.0 innovation in knowledge management that is gradually replacing the use of the more rigid approach defined by data warehousing in many organisations.

It has also prompted a move towards collecting a small amount of data from multiple sources rather than deeper information from a centralised data warehouse. This is partly driven by users’ expectation levels having been raised by the consumerisation of search engines such as iGoogle and NetVibes, which allow users to customise the pages with their own information feeds.

“A lot of data warehousing continues for those who are looking to do a lot of analysis, but the new thing is looking beyond the information that is owned by your organisation and towards collective data, like the sentiment analysis and activity monitoring on Twitter for example, so you can become aware when interest in your product or a competitors’ product starts to flare up,” says Mann.

In many cases though, organisations still prefer to centralise knowledge or information derived from multiple applications in a data warehouse designed to simplify its extraction and analysis to support BI operations.

The advantage here is that data retrieval does not slow down individual application efficiency, while any inconsistencies or duplication of data can be eliminated during its input using master data management (MDM) processes to streamline the knowledge management process and improve the accuracy of the information stored.

MDM is often applied following merger and acquisition activity that sees data from different entities pooled into one data warehouse. Tim Broughton is the IT director for Findel Direct, a company with an annual turnover of £100m that o wns a number of home shopping web sites, including the online retailers Kitbag, Confetti and iwantoneofthose, as well as Express Gifts and the Kleeneze Distribution Network.

Having acquired a number of sites as internet startups, including the now de funct Cotswold Company and Letterbox, Findel Direct found it had inherited a range of back-office platforms and web platform technologies.

“My strategy was to bring the back office on to one platform, so that Findel Direct could upsell across multiple platforms and brands,” says Broughton.

“For example, the Cotswold Company has some really nice children’s furniture which would sell well in Letterbox, but we had to send email from one system to another [to transfer that data], and physically check product stock.”

Centralising Findel Direct’s data set on one tightly controlled master record has eliminated that transactional overhead and brought the company many more benefits, though a reduction in staff costs is not one of them.

“We needed more staff up front to make sure that the product data was inputted accurately, though in the [data] warehouse we went from 11 down to four because the product data was in first time, and did not have to be maintained at the back end,” says Broughton. “On the upside, there were virtually no product returns, there were upsales and cross sales across sites, and fairly consistent relations [with customers and suppliers].”