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.

Custom BI solution vs Package solution:

These days there is a lot of talk about use of package solution like Jaros as a BI solution. This will save lots of effort needed in the analysis and design phase. Jaros provides BI solution on top of Oracle ERP. It uses the metadata of Oracle ERP in creating the metadata for ETL. Currently it supports 14 modules in ERP. Normally, a big organization will have lot of customization on ERP. This requires good deal of efforts in customizing the package to business. Jaros is not a feasible solution that use more than 14 supported modules and also for large ERPs with heavy customization.
When we develop a BI solution we will have the liberty to choose the ingredients of our BI solution. We can have the state-of-the-art tools in each phase of the Data Warehousing. Every problem in this world is unique. Each requires a unique way of addressing it. Ideally it suggested to deal it specifically rather than generalizing it and using a general solution available in the market.

Proper Project Management:

Research shows that about 47- 49 % projects are over run either in terms of schedule or budget. This could be because of various reasons like dependency on an external events, occurrence of unforeseen events. Good delivery of project needs competency in many areas. Technical competency is the foremost. Other paraphernalia like preparing project plan and updating it at regular intervals and Communicating effectively among the team and to customer are necessary.

There are many technically competent people who are bad in communication. These people did not feel the necessity of effective communication. Proper communication is necessary in a project. Messages we communicate will provoke feelings and these feeling influence the reaction and decision of the other party.
Every Project will have dependency on external forces. These forces are out of our control. So we should give proper lead time while making our project plan. We should be more watchful as the planned date approaches. Proper alerts should be raised if any delay is suspected. customer should be notified and alternate arrangements should be made.

Team motto should be placed above personal motives. Lots of times, we see that a person with lesser experience will leading a person with grater experience. In such case, if the manager fails to win the confidence of his/her subordinate chances are good that team members do not show commitment. Commitment should start from the manager. So is the manager, so be a team member. I read a sentence about importance of employee management. Quoted here for your quick reading.
"Employee and management stress costs companies billions of dollars annually through increased absenteeism, lack of enthusiasm for the job, and poor performance. According to several industry surveys, the following factors cause the most stress in the workplace: unclear policies and direction, failure to show appreciation, lack of communication, and lack of control."

Proper project management is a vast subject. However i tried to give a bird’s eye view of it.