World became more dynamic?

Change is common phenomenon in this world. When we ask people who have been doing a particular job and looking for new job, the reason for their quest, the answer we get in most of the cases is 'looking for a change'. On the other side we fear about change. This is duplicity. (I am not trying to find fault with people.) World changes continously. It has been transforming contenously since it was born after the BIg Bang that happened billions of years ago. What we see today is a result of series of changes that took place over a period of billions of years. Change is so dangerous that it some times it resulted in the complete wipe out of famous Dinosaurs species. The reason is climatic change.
The next point i would like to take your attention to is, time taken for a change. Continuing in the climate terms, these days we see that time taken for change of climate is reducing continuously and at a greater pace. This could be attributed to man's actions. To correct this through out the world, we see many environmentalists fighting for better climate environment.
So the things we see with nature is also applicable to lot of things we do in our daily life and so we can learn some lessons from nature. World is symmetric in many aspects. I would like extrapolate this 'rapid pace of change' to business. We see that there is a change in the way the business is carried out. Though the fundamental rules on which is business is carried out is same. The ways that are used for carrying out the business are under constant change. Research tells that the average life time of a corporate has come down from 120 yrs to 25 years. The reasons for change could be many which are out of ones control. One should anticipate change and be armed to face the dragon of change.

Go Global, be Local...

Most of the large successful businesses today made a modest start. They started on a small scale catering to limited geography and then extrapolated it to other geographies. Revenue potential in a geography is limited, when the business wants to increase its business beyond these limits, the obvious option is to expand the business model to other geographies. This way the business will have the opportunity to tap the potential in those geographies.

The way Business is carried out varies from region to region. Though these variations are minor, nuances of a geography are best known by people in that geography. In order to do a good business in a geography, it is advisable to recruit locals and give them the responsibilities. This will be paid off in terms of greater business to the company. This is one of success factors of America Insurance Group founded by Cornelius Vander Starr.

Wall Street… the Culprit?

Every organization wants to expand its business. The resource that fuels expansion of any organization is capital. There are many ways to generate capital. Normally companies go public to meet their demands of huge capital. When a company goes public for the first time, then it is called Initial Public Offer (IPO). There is a lot of exercise that goes into allocation of shares among individual investors, promoters etc. In order for the stock to be traded, it has to be listed with a stock exchange. In case of India it is either Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) or National Stock Exchange (NSE). After it is listed, the stock price varies with the performance of Company. Financial results released by companies at regular intervals is a good indicator of performance of a company. Wall Street closely watches the balance sheets of the publicly traded companies because it is bothered about the heavy betting it takes on a companies stock. As a result companies become too conscious of Wall Street. Meeting the market expectations is good thing to cheer and a good way of repaying the investors who reposed their faith in the company. In some cases where companies give more importance to this goal, they hide the stock de-valuing factors. They fabricate the books and present a normal picture. This tampering with numbers will only give temporary relief to organization , but has a huge negative implication which will roll out eventually. Examples of Enron, America Insurance Group are good examples of this.

Is wall Street the Culprit for the mistakes committed by organizations?

IT as a companion to business process flow...

Typical an organization will have many business processes one for each purpose. Some of the main process are sourcing, customer relation management, finance, human resource management etc. Most of the ERPs provide these functionalities as a part of them. Not all vendors are good in all the processes. Some are leaders in some process. For example Oracle is good in CRM, Hyperion is good in Finance Planning etc. Apart from these processes, there are processes in most of the Organizations, that can be automated. It is for this reason we see many custom Java based applications that cater to each of these processes. All business processes follow a certain order. At every point there should be an application that caters to that business process. This application can be a ERP module or custom Java application. Such a seam less solution will allow the company to capture information at each point and leverage the data.

Once we have data in applications, it can be transferred from it to a data warehouse using standard ETL tools. A reporting layer on top of the Data Warehouse can allow users to see trends. For example a report on customer-related-data from a CRM, will show the customer trend. Reports can be a set of standard corporate reports available for all users or adhoc reports of each user. Value of information will reduce with time. To have more valuable information, Data Warehouse needs to be refreshed more frequently.

Man is the best imitator:

The reason for Man being the best imitator could be biological. This imitation determines the way world goes. When we're born, our mind is like a blank hard disk. As we grow we see, listen and experience many things. These form impressions in our mind which will influence  our reactions and decisions. Hence our personality is a sum total of all the conditions in which we're brought up.
As we grow, our elders teach us how to do things. Their elders taught the same to them. This is how how-to-do-procedure is passed on from one generation to another generation. If somebody tries to do things in a way different from the traditionally accepted way, they are criticized and their ideas are met with skepticism. And some doomsayers predict the end of the world. This is one major reason that prevents innovative thinking.

Business Intelligence... the life saviour

London Fire Brigade, the UK's largest fire brigade uses BI Solution for identifying potential spots, making decisions in allocating and deploying resources. This way it has reduced the number of Fire incidents. And hence reduced the number of causalities.

Fall of financial giants has put the world markets into a tail spin. This has caused a stress on minds of investors. They may not be aware of this. Research says this kind stress can actually shorten lifespan of a human being. Some experts opined that the crisis and its aftermath would have been avoided had there been a sound BI solution in place. Which means a better life for investors. A sound BI solution will guarantee better future for a company. Better future of the company will ensure better future for its employees. It is good that, of late, companies started realizing it.

SaaS in Business Intelligence...

SaaS... Software as a Service. The moment we say this, the name that strikes everyone's mind is Salesforce.com. It has revolutionized the way solutions delivered to customer. It provides the necessary hardware and support of hardware. All a customer needs to do is pay for the volume of resources used. This will take the responsibility of maintaining the hardware and human resources for maintaining it and instead the customer can concentrate on his core business process. The same rational has fuelled outsourcing as well. Salesforce.com's services are mainly related to the field of CRM.
Of late importance and potential of BI is recognized increasingly. We see BI is used in many fields which we never thought will. For example, Police department is using it in observing the trend in crimes. Experts feel that had all all big financial institutions in US (Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch, America International Group etc.) used a proper BI solution, they wouldn't have landed in the current quagmire. In the current scenario, an organization needs to set up its own infrastructure its users' needs. It would be a dream come true for many business users if BI is delivered as a service. We see that there a paradigm shift is happening. Tools like Cognos are now delivering reports over Web.
Ideally a Bi solution should be user friendly. It should very easy to navigate and should be less complex in filtering and getting required data. In general, people are more comfortable in using portals. It would be good if we can have a BI solution that is delivered through portals. Such a solution will truly empower the frontend sales folks and help them in making judicious decision, which will bring in lots or returns for the investment by a company.