Business leaders seek insights

Senior executives feel they do not have visibility into their day-to-day operations, according to a recent IDC Asia-Pacific survey.

Speaking at a recent conference in Bangkok, Patrick Chan, head of emerging technologies IDC Asia-Pacific, said that 80 percent of the C-level executives who were surveyed feel that they lack visibility into the business. Most executives, he added, believe that signing on to the Sarbanes-Oxley declaration is tantamount to gambling as they simply do not know if they are compliant or not.

In his presentation, he reported a shift from Web-based passive portals presenting information to an event driven model where information is pushed to relevant points of a business--a change that is affecting areas such as agriculture and farming.

For instance, a lobster fisherman might have to decide whether or not to drop a cage into the sea. Today they have PDAs showing GIS data coupled with business intelligence from past fishing outings to guide them.

Chan also gave an easy to understand analogy for SOA (services oriented architecture). "Movies are getting better all the time. Why? Because they are reusing all those special effects," he said, pointing out that one of three key reasons for adopting SOA was the reuse of modular code, as well as for internal integration and adjusting more readily to changing business needs.

RFID (radio frequency identification) is another technology that is changing things in the agricultural sector. For example it is being used to help farmers record grazing patterns, how the cow is eating and how much milk it is producing.

The recent foot and mouth disease outbreak in the UK happened because sick cows were not segregated in time. Real time business intelligence could help alert the farmer that one cow is not feeling well before it was too late.

The biggest challenge to organizations is leveraging the data locked away in spreadsheets and in operational records. Users also need to be given a clear benefit to log more data, Chan said.

He warned about the danger of stringing together too many SOA components without designing in redundancy. SOA is about simplification and building services, but 90 percent of the time, new services are designed for one department rather than designed to be used across the enterprise.

Craig Stires, principle consultant for intelligence platforms, SAS Asia Pacific, also presented the seminar with challenges in implementing business intelligence (BI).

Traditional BI has been about creating reports and pumping them out, but this has not changed the way businesses have worked, he noted, with the biggest barriers being cultural rather than technical. "Who wants a system that comes in to audit what you do? Performance measurement is not always something that is bad for you as an employee, but if you have resistance, then the whole thing comes to a halt," he explained.

He said organizations need an information strategy that looks at projects not just from the technical side, but how it will ensure buy-in from its users and how the financial planning will change because of the BI system, for example.

Amit Mathur, principal engineer with Vignette, spoke of similar challenges when it came to legal contracts.

For instance, a lot of legal contract work is done offline, a word which he stretches to include any non-formal system, such as instant messenger, VoIP or mobile email. It is duplicated in e-mail and hard drives across the enterprise.

If a spreadsheet is e-mailed out and many people put in their own annotations, combining the versions is often a problem, a technological rat's nest that is impossible to integrate and results in an non-adaptive IT infrastructure. A typical organisation will have multiple operating systems and many different databases.

The challenge comes down to collaboration. A legal contract should not be the sole domain of the legal department, while work on preparing manufacturing or marketing to take advantage of the new product that will come about when the contract is signed should not have to wait.

Instead, it needs to be shared with marketing, with the Web master, with HR and ERP, with CRM to design new marketing campaigns. Different guidelines and versions need to be made with details of what can be published and when.

Finally, each project will need its own workspace where everyone can collaborate, he suggested.