Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 26 January, 2011 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Information management, social media |
Social media within an organisation is not about being a social butterfly. Its not about posting your latest drunken moments and what you did last weekend. These stuff has minimal returns on investment. However, if I can have a system that allows me to be a people, data and process butterfly, that will increase my productivity, efficiency and accuracy.
Think about this – a self serve BI platform that links back to the business processes / supply chain setup and the people who are related to the data. You can now get the information that you need to run your business unit and ensure that it runs perfectly with the changes that are happening with other business units and ensuring that if something wrong happens you know who to look for right away.
This is how I see a corporate social media platform should work. Call it whatever you want. 
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 21 December, 2010 under Information management |
Its been a year since I last wrote anything on this blog. Work has been absolutely crazy and school work hasn’t quite helped as well. I am now on my Christmas break and have abit more time to do the stuff I enjoy.
One of the technologies I am following this year is called in memory analytics. This is really an extension of Business Intelligence (BI). Let’s discuss BI before moving into in memory analytics.
BI is synonymous with data warehouse, data cubes, dashboards and reporting.
First of all, data warehouses do not provide full real time data of all your transactional databases. There are issues with performance of the legacy systems, integration, costs and hardware limitations. Therefore, reports that business users receive are 15mins late or a week old (depending on the type of data).
Moreover, data cubes require developers to build it, test it and deploy it. This takes time, effort and money. Most companies nowadays can get the top 20% of the long tail of reports right. However, the rest of the 80% is not met.
There are then reporting dashboards that try to do two things.
1) Provide a pretty front end graphs and charts to the data
2) Allow user manipulation of data and try to meet some of the unmet business reporting requirements. This generally requires a good understanding of the data, a comprehensive data dictionary and some technical skills. I am not sure how many people in businesses have such a skill.
Additionally, once a report is generated and the contents have been verified to be correct, analysis of the data, discussion/collaboration and actions needs to be taken based on what the report says. I have told a few people this: data sits in the database, information is in the report and wisdom is the outcome of the analysis and actions taken because of the report. Information management tackles the reporting side of things but getting people to take appropriate actions on the data in the report that is aligned to the overall business strategy and actions of other teams within the firm is not easy. Deriving cooperative wisdom is important but difficult.
In memory analytics aims to solve some of the current BI problems. Using a combination of better multi core processing, advanced multi threading technologies, 64 bit architecture and cost/speed of memory, it is technically possible to store all data in the memory (RAM) of the computer instead of the harddrive. What this means is that data will be real time and possibly a reduction of costs as only one database is required (instead of the transactional database and data warehouse).
The benefits of this is enormous in some industries like airline, retail, national security and banking. Real time data and analysis is critical for the optimisation of yield management, profits and identifying any arbitrage.
However, this still does not solve the issue of converting data into wisdom. Businesses need to create a culture of measuring the data in the reports to the performance metrics. Businesses track earnings and spending against budgets but tracking budgets are the result of operational performance and tracking. This is where the next step of BI should be focused on. Businesses have to encourage business units to be agile and nimble to react to the constantly changing business environments.
I do foresee that:
1) improving the technology around in-memory analytics and
2) improving processes around BI and reporting
to be the two key focus areas of organisations in the next couple of years.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 28 May, 2009 under Academic, Enterprise 2.0, Information management |
I have previously thought that these two concepts do not sit well together as Enterprise 2.0 is freeform and allows users to do as they please. In the world wide web, this could work as there are so many people out there fixing up things that are not right on Wikipedia. However, within an organisation resources are scare and time is money. Organisations do not have the luxury of having a huge army of editors internally to fix up and garden the Enterprise 2.0 platform. If this is a problem, what is the solution?
I personally believe that BPM (Business Process Management) could play a role in this. I am not saying that free-formness should be thrown out of the window. What I am saying is that some levels of BPM could help to improve the quality of the information and data on the platform. The processes involved should enable and not restrict people from editing and creating content. I believe it should be light weight and adaptable to any kind of content as well.
What I envisage is as follows:
1) Generic template for all content created.
2) Content review over time and updates
3) Usage of links and data from other sources
4) Workflows in teams and projects to ensure up to date information
5) Overall manager for each work space and would be held accountable for the space
Does all these make sense? Please let me know your thoughts.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 19 September, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Information management, IT strategy |
Everyone knows that there is no organisation in the world that is 100% efficient meaning all business process moves without a flaw, IT systems are always working as expected, people never makes mistakes and analysis of the business operations is always spot on.
Let me tell you a story, I just spoke to a call centre regarding a telecommunication product I have. I told them I would like to downgrade the plan to something more light weight in the new billing month. They said I can’t do it because that plan that I asked for is only available for new customers (it was not listed on the website and I think its dumb but if its the business process they would like to take, so be it). So after a short “discussion” we hung up. I went online to customer self service and saw the plan there AVAILABLE for me to downgrade. So I happily downgraded. All good, I get what I want.
This is a story of inefficiency. Either ways, this company made a mistake. Either the call centre staff was not informed that customer CAN downgrade to the plan now or the self service site is not updated.
There is no solution to such kinds of problems. If its not this scenario, there will be something else. Organisations must try to reduce any forms of inefficiency and communication problems. The above story is an example that humans are not aligned to the system (or vice versa). There are some areas of interest in organisations which should be addressed:
Information management
Organisations deals with mountain loads of data and to make sense of the data in a report is hard enough. Getting data extracted, transferred and loaded (ETL) into your data warehouse can be a nightmare in itself. Designing whatever reports required by each business department and teams can be another issue. Getting it out in time is another issue. So after all these steps, you still need to analyse it and make sense out of it – this is simply not a simple task! Information management must be done well so that management could see that “Oh that plan should not be there for people to downgrade to”
Collaboration and communication
Enterprise 2.0 aims to solve this problem. However, for someone to actually listen, accept and execute an instruction, its not as easy as just posting a piece of information online. Managers would need to promote it, send information out to people, make sure they understand and move on. There is no easy way out. Call centre staff needs to be told “Hey, from now on, people can downgrade their plan to the other plan!” and they have to acknowledge the information. If you argue that people should be RSS-ed / emailed the information and they take action from there, well in the perfect world, it will work that way but not on the imperfect earth.
P.S. Half of this is ranting my frustration about the error. Forgive me.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 12 September, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Information management |
In any large organisation, there is likely to be some kind or CRM system like Siebel and there will be finance, HR, inventory, knowledge management system, business intelligence and the list goes on. That’s alot of systems to manage. Across all these systems, there’s alot of data stored under it and even more in your enterprise data warehouse. Stakeholders would then access the reports and make decisions based on that they get. However, as most of us know, not all decisions are easy to make and requires thinking and team work. After all, “the wisdom of crowds” have taught us that two heads is better than one.
I do see that there is a huge potential in this space where an enterprise collaboration site can come in and connect all these reports and numbers together, display it on ONE screen and discuss on ONE platform. However, its much easier said than done. Technology is still not at the stage where platforms like Clearspace and Connections is ready to integrate into systems like Cognos, Business Objects, SAP Financials or Hyperion. There is no point if both are not integrated together. You want dynamic data report on a dynamic discussion site.
I guess to a certain degree I am kinda dreaming, many companies can’t even get their reporting right or they are not willing to spend on a collaboration system. Let alone spending money to integrate them together. But I could really imagine the power of solid, reliable business reports integrated with a collaboration site with inputs from the team around the world and hopefully make the best logical decision everytime.
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 9 September, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, Information management, social media |
My employer BearingPoint is a leader in information management (IM) and Mike 2.0 is a great example of our capabilities. We have completed a great projects around the world and has been viewed by many as leaders in this space. Being an enterprise 2.0 evangelist, I will ask myself, IM is great! Its addresses many different aspects of information within the organisation from strategy down to data migration. But that’s targeting your structured data through SQL, ETL and the 101 acronyms out there. What about unstructured data?
Enterprise 2.0 is about collaboration, social networking, innovation and so on. The end product of the whole company using a common platform to interact is a huge database of unstructured data. At the moment, there are some ways to mine this data and try to make sense of it. However, I wouldn’t call these methods productive nor efficient. This huge database of information which is currently untapped and understood at a higher level. There has been new technologies like natural language search and ideas like the semantic web which I hope would lay the foundation for the mining and understanding of large scale unstructured data better.
I do believe that this is the future of where the world is heading. We have now become extremely competent in managing large amounts of structured data, making it readily available and usable. The next area is to make unstructured data understandable and usable.
