New Wine old Bottle OR Old Wine New Bottle…!
I met the CFO of a leading organisation last week and was astonished to find that they have spent a whole lot of time & manpower resources to develop a transaction processing application. With due challenges to resources moving out (during crucial phases of the project) and technology obsolescence issues, they were able to go-live on the application in 8 months time. The CFO was more than pleased that he had the right business process in place, as desired. He mentioned that he couldn’t garner the courage of deploying a packaged application because of the rigidity in adhering to industry practices and not his organisational practices.
Though this is a debatable point, and not the crux of this post, the immediate point where the CFO is now stuck is the rigidity of the home grown system to give him as and when required output. I was further astonished with this because being a home grown application, they are themselves masters of their database structure and hence should be able to cull out data without much glitches. However, the main challenge to get the right output from this system were related to robust data analysis which is unfortunately limited to spreadsheets.
Another aspect is the huge data growth that has started happening on this system and the same reports have reduced response times every week….This has now brought him to a level of looking at a robust reporting & data analysis tool with performance enhancement options.
I had a straight forward question to him that he should start an in-house development for this project as well and what he answered was an eye-opener. He mentioned that he had decided to start in-house development of his OLTP application because he was defining his business practices which is a combination of Technology & Business domain.
However, he feels that his reporting needs will be more or less met by technology without redefining the Business practices that he has already configured. He has anyways used a ready-made technology platform to develop his OLTP application and just creatively designed his business processes to run on that technology. He didn’t create the technology platform.
For the reporting need, he is more concerned on how to cull out data and massage them to make a logic out of that data. The TB is getting generated from the OLTP, but how do I make analytical use of the TB data? So he intends to use a technology component to get this done and a ready-made BI solution will serve his purpose.
The motto goes like this – I know my data better than anyone else and hence I know how to analyse that data and hence I am fine without templatised industry specific reporting models. This actually brings us to think that BI solutions can be just a technology component to many organisations.
With templatised best reporting models, some organisations think that they will be restricted to use what the world uses and not what they aspire differently. How else can I differentiate my organisation from the rest……Good point Mr. CFO, but maybe there are more things behind which we might have to debate…..I leave all of you at this point to start a debate. In my 12 years of application sales experience I thought these ideas have gone to rest long time back, but mind you, there’s a large set of organisations out there thriving on these principles….
Posted on December 24th, 2008 by Vikram Kole
Filed under: Business Intelligence, View Points & Perspective
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