Lean businesses is a hot topic these days and Leading Edge have many years of experience in developing programs that are accredited by institutes such as University College Cork, The Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CPA) and The Institute of Industrial Engineers.

Over the years Leading Edge’s programs have assisted companies such as PepsiCo, Boston Scientific , Musgraves and many others in saving significant costs as well as improve customer delivery and bottom line profits. Individuals taking their greenbelt and Blackbelt programs have benefited their organisations’ in terms of streamlined processes and cost savings as well as in many cases become fulltime lean practitioners bringing their expertise and associated benefits to client companies across all spectrums from SMEs to corporates.

Via Consulting is proud to be Leading Edge’s IT partner. Via Principal Joe Hussey liked Leading Edge’s portfolio so much, he was the first to sign up to their new Financial Services Green belt program just launched.

For further information or to ‘test drive’ one of Leading Edge’s training programs, contact Leading Edge on +353 21 4855863 or email info@leadingedge.ie.

This time around, I’m going to focus on some options on how you can get more out of a business intelligence solution. If you’re thinking that’s all well and good, but you don’t have a business intelligence solution, read on, chances are that there are pieces discussed below that you have implemented in some form already. In essence, if you relay on data from different parts of your organisation and yet may not be relating all that to your overall business, then you’ve got the beginnings of a business intelligence solution.

So it’s time to get thinking about your business and I’m going to ask questions along the way to get you thinking about your current business intelligence solution. I’ll use a few examples, but where possible always try to relate these questions to your own scenario. And if you can’t feel free to get in touch!

1. Do you use many applications and data warehouses?

Many organisations utilise an array of software applications, databases or data warehouses to help them understand how their organisation is performing. Frequently, companies and organisations tend to have more than one B.I. solution with different departments running different applications and all likely to be getting the same results or reports. If this is true of your organisation, perhaps it’s time to realise what you use and what you need and decide to consolidate those applications. Question yourself on whether you want your accounts department and sales department to use two (or more) different applications to gather the same data result?

Aside from software applications, there’s where you store your data. Does your organisation store the same data in many different repositories? Do you have five data warehouses that all contain the same data? Can you consolidate that data to perhaps two data warehouses? It’s worth a thought – not only are you saving on storage space, but you could also be saving on running costs as well.

Don’t forget to look at your existing software – determine whether the applications you use to gather and analyse data are out of date and can be replaced by an integrated all-in-one solution, or even better, whether you’re entitled to a free upgrade!

2. Can you get more data – but be clever about it?

Yes, get more data. But not the same data you have already. A good intelligence solution will always seek more data, provided it’s relevant to the organisation. Having scaled down your data warehouse and removed duplicate data, you may have some space to add more. Is it worthwhile to have some data on your competitor’s sales and analyse a like-for-like comparison against your own?

If not competitors, perhaps there are other areas of the business that can be added to your existing data. For example, it may be important to know how your business performs against special incentives being run and track like-for-like performance on those incentives if they occur at different intervals during your financial year? Do you want to break down your data between regions, countries or even cities?

3. Will you get the business involved?

Your business intelligence is only as strong as the people that rely on it. They are the people that understand how their part of the organisation should work, identify when things go wrong and define how their part of the organisation performs. Having a representative from all relevant aspects of your organisation be part of your business intelligence solution aids in agreed business rules and adds a layer of trust to the data being produced.

Once your stakeholders are in place, get them to draw up a process for their own section releative to your business intelligence solution. Ensure all are aligned. Once done, make sure your stakeholders agree on their processes and where suitable, update those processes into one over process for the company. Get the flow of information unified and together, keep those who rely on the data involved.

It’s not enough to hand over an intelligence solution to your IT department and let it take its course, your business stakeholders must be involved throughout. It’s simple, when your staff trusts the data then you know that it is reliable data.

4. Are you thinking outside the box?

Sometimes looking at other aspects of the organisation can aid in improving performance overall. If you’re a sales organisation are you tracking your staff performance with your sales data? Can you tell whether more can be achieved from your staff? If an employee sells 10k of product does that make him employee of the month? Or can your business intelligence solution identify his 2 hour cumulative breaks during the day and relate that to sales performance? Can you get more out of your employee than before – are you setting realistic targets for your sales staff?

Likewise, for call centres – you may be tracking calls and the nature of those calls, but are you also tracking the number of times your agents may need to call back to a client. Are you using intelligence to highlight how many of your staff are calling back more customers than others?  Perhaps, your intelligence system needs to track your agents training history? If they’re calling more customers back maybe it’s time to revisit training opportunities and improve your call standards even more.

I hope that some of these questions will help in improving your business intelligence solution. By asking them, you may ultimately end up saving money and have a more streamlined business in place. Needless to say, understanding your business is essential and by asking these questions you may start down that road to further success.

Via Consulting offer organisations a free consultation on their business intelligence requirements, if you would like to learn more, please click here to contact us.

• Google privacy policies apply. Here’s a more digestible version. The first thing to notice in the privacy policy is that a Google account must be created to use Google Apps and so it looks like we are back to square one with regard to Google having free reign over user data . However the Apps T&Cs note that wherever there is a conflict with this and the terms at any other URL then the Apps T&Cs take preference . This seems to bear out Marc’s assertion above.
• Google make a statement of intent to implement appropriate measures to protect data from alteration or disclosure. Though the EU Data Protection Directive is alluded to in this paragraph it falls short of saying that the directive will be adhered to.
• Marc mentioned that Google is an adherent to the Safe Harbour principles which enables entities operating in the EU to offshore data to a non EU country and not find themselves breaking the EU DP Directive. The ethos of the Safe Harbour principles is self regulatory . US companies who which to declare themselves adherent to the principles ’self-certify’ with the US Department of Commerce. This contrasts to the approach of the EU directive which required that all member states enact their own Data Protection Legislation.
• Serving Ads is optional and may be toggled by the user via the control panel. No revenues are earned by the user for showing google ads.
• Confidential Information is defined in the glossary of the agreement as (I’m paraphrasing) all information disclosed by either party under the agreement which is explicitly deemed confidential or which may reasonably assumed to be such. This would seem to give cover to all user emails and documents as this content may well arguably be “reasonably assumed to be confidential”. It would be recommendable therefore if when taking out this agreement the user was to make explicit to Google that their emails and documents were to be marked as ‘confidential information’ as this term is understood in the agreement .
• The T&Cs goes on to say that information marked confidential in this way may be disclosed to group employees and/or professional advisors who have agreed in writing to maintain its confidentiality. Also , professional advisors who are ‘otherwise bound’ to maintain data confidentiality may also have access. Now I’m afraid the meaning of ‘otherwise bound’ isn’t clear. It could refer to an overarching NDA that a consulting company would sign with Google that would cover all their consultants’ onsite at Google. But that’s just a guess on my part.
• On termination of the agreement the parties agree to destroy confidential information held by each on request of the other.
• Intellectual property rights of customer data are not transferred to Google.
• You agree to have your name published in a list of Google Apps customers.
• The agreement then goes in to some detail is given on what would happen in the event of breaches or 3rd party intellectual property claims against either Google brands or technologies or user-supplied content/features. Then, finally limitations to liability are discussed.

On the question of ‘data lock-in’ issue Marc mentioned that Google would provide tools to allow users to get their data back from Google Apps in an efficient manner should you decide to end the service? Interestingly I recently came across the data liberation front created by Brian Fitzpatrick who is a Chicago based Google Engineer. So it does look like some Googlers are burning up their “20% time” to making cloud-bound data more efficiently accessible. However, despite the encouraging aspiration expressed in the site’s main page to make it easier to move data in and out of Google, I see that Google Docs still only allows you to download (export) your docs one by one.

I’m no lawyer as I said before but if my reading is any way on track then under the terms of the Google Apps Premier agreement there does appear to be a protection of sorts given to customer data confidentiality. A prospective client, once appraised of the nature of this protection will need to make a judgement based on the nature of their business on whether or not Google Apps is for them.

Diarmuid Keane © 2009

That’s the question posed by best -selling business author and arch blogger Jeff Jarvis in his excellent book ‘What Would Google Do?’.

Interestingly, Jeff who glorifies Google in his book (a bit like hagiography on a company at times!), suggest that many companies in his book (and I tend to agree with many of Jeff’s premises by the way), should do what Google would do in areas such as customer understanding and focus. For example he talks about engagement with customer on the basis that your worst customer could be your best friend (if dealt with sympathetically for example).

Well, I have to say that Google has disappointed me big-time. Diarmuid Keane of Via Consulting wrote a blog recently entitled ‘Hey Google Get o’ my cloud’ and challenged Google in terms of the data ownership issue for companies wishing to adopt Google applications as part of a cost effective alternative to the Microsoft model for example. We gave Google the opportunity to set out their stall in advance of the blog being put up on our website. We then pursued Google through one of their representatives (who had coincidentally contacted me regarding embracing their Google apps some weeks previously) and also and through Twitter. What was the result? Google prevarication and references to having to check with their PR department and the net result? Nada , save for another set of terms and conditions sent on to Diarmuid.

For me, this is very poor indeed. All Google had to do was to provide a blog to Via Consulting with their own position clarifying the area around Diarmuid’s concerns. But no, they ran for cover and failed to do what Jeff says that Google does better than most – engage, understand people. I’m sorry Jeff but on this occasion it was what Google Didn’t Do!!!

If you’re unfamiliar with business intelligence, here’s a quick introduction. Business Intelligence or BI as it’s often abbreviated, allows a company to analyse and understand its performance by giving a detailed picture of what is going on in terms of its business and customers. It’s a growing area for many businesses and a recent Butler report urges many companies not to put off implementing a business intelligence solution.

But what exactly does BI try to answer? Well, it can be anything. Are you querying why your budget is being overspent in one department and under spent in another? Or worse, are now realising that you had a budget and now it’s gone? Could your sales revenue be growing in one country but not as profitable in another? Is your most profitable product now seeing a slowdown in sales or is your new product outselling your other lines? Do you have an acceptable level of returning customers?

Questions such as these are the essence of business intelligence. A recent Gartner report found that because of a lack of information, processes and tools, more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about changes in their business and markets. BI is there to plug that gap and allow business to make such decisions and to analyse trends over both a short and long term basis and be better prepared for where their markets will take them. For example, knowing whether your product sales dip in a particular country during the summer months will allow you to determine how much effort – and cost – should be allocated to that area during the time. Do you increase or decrease your marketing campaign? Do you hire more staff in that region or redeploy existing staff until sales pick up?

That’s what business intelligence sets out to achieve and at its most basic, it provides all of your data in one central source, thus allowing for faster more informed decisions and more effective planning.

Having one central source of data is your starting point.  But trusting your data is key to successful business intelligence. With many data sources within a company, IT departments need to ensure that all sources of data are aligned and accurate. In many companies, different versions of the same data are scattered between departments. Sales teams will have their revenue figures and financial departments will have their own set of that revenue data. Ensuring they line up correctly and validate against each other means you can trust your data and then start making more informed business decisions. In a future post, we’ll look at the ways of storing your data and the transformation tools available to ensure your data is valid and consistent.

Whilst business intelligence is ultimately a decision based on large amounts of data, it needs to be stressed that it is more than just a series of Excel spreadsheets with sums and averages aligned against cost centers. BI allows you to dive into your business data figures and really understand how your business is operating and add context to items such as your budget and to be prepared for the future and to forecast more accurately.

However, BI is not just an IT department problem. For it to work, all departments within an organisation need to work closer together. While IT will provide and support the necessary infrastructure, it is up to each department to contribute and define the various business rules that will determine how successful the company will be.  Understanding where areas of data duplication, missing data, corrupted or just incorrect data occurs is necessary to help make those critical decisions. IT may understand the technical need, but only those working in their department know what their business needs are.

So where to get started? If you haven’t launched a BI solution, the chances are you’re well on the way to one. Microsoft, SAP, Oracle,  MySQL, IBM all provide BI tools and database solutions, but as is often the case in the IT world, there’s other low cost options, with many open source BI tools such as Eclipse, MicroStrategy, JasperSoft and Freereporting available to try out.

Determining which option is right for you is a decision we could write many posts about, however VIA here to help with your business intelligence solutions. In future posts we’ll take a look at some of these applications and how best to protect your data through data transformations and data reliability, we’ll also look at where problems with data integrity can occur.

Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications while sharing the resources of a single physical computer. And, because each virtual machine is isolated from other virtualized machines, if one crashes, it doesn’t affect the others.

Hypervisor software is the secret sauce that makes virtualization possible. This software, also known as a virtualization manager, sits between the hardware and the operating system, and decouples the operating system and applications from the hardware. The hypervisor assigns the amount of access that the operating systems and applications have with the processor and other hardware resources, such as memory and disk input/output.

In addition to using virtualization technology to partition one machine into several virtual machines, you can also use virtualization solutions to combine multiple physical resources into a single virtual resource.
A good example of this is storage virtualization, where multiple network storage resources are pooled into what appears as a single storage device for easier and more efficient management of these resources. Other types of virtualization you may hear about include:

Network virtualization splits available bandwidth in a network into independent channels that can be assigned to specific servers or devices.

Application virtualization separates applications from the hardware and the operating system, putting them in a container that can be relocated without disrupting other systems.

Desktop virtualization enables a centralized server to deliver and manage individualized desktops remotely. This gives users a full client experience, but lets IT staff provision, manage, upgrade and patch them virtually, instead of physically.

Virtualization was first introduced in the 1960s by IBM to boost utilization of large, expensive mainframe systems by partitioning them into logical, separate virtual machines that could run multiple applications and processes at the same time. In the 1980s and 1990s, this centrally shared mainframe model gave way to a distributed, client-server computing model, in which many low-cost x86 servers and desktops independently run specific applications.

While virtualization faded from the limelight for a while, it is now one of the hottest trends in the industry again, as organizations aim to increase the utilization, flexibility and cost-effectiveness in a distributed computing environment. VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft, IBM, RedHat and many other vendors offer virtualization solutions.

Why Should You Care?
Virtualization can help you shift your IT focus from managing boxes to improving the services you provide to the organization. If you are managing multiple servers and desktops, virtualization can help you to:

• Save money. Companies often run just one application per server because they don’t want to risk the possibility that one application will crash and bring down another on the same machine. Estimates indicate that most x86 servers are running at an average of only 10 to 15 percent of total capacity. With virtualization, you can turn a single purpose server into a multi-tasking one, and turn multiple servers into a computing pool that can adapt more flexibly to changing workloads.
• Save energy. Businesses spend a lot of money powering unused server capacity. Virtualization reduces the number of physical servers, reducing the energy required to power and cool them.
• Save time. With fewer servers, you can spend less time on the manual tasks required for server maintenance. On the flip side, pooling many storage devices into a single virtual storage device, you can perform tasks such as backup, archiving and recovery more easily and more quickly. It’s also much faster to deploy a virtual machine than it is to deploy a new physical server.
• Reduce desktop management headaches. Managing, securing and upgrading desktops and notebooks can be a hassle. Desktop virtualization solutions let you manage user desktops centrally, making it easier to keep desktops updated and secure.

Google Apps is a web accessible platform that provides storage and functionality to a business to run a mail server and office documentation editing capability. It’s really made up of three elements: Gmail with domain personalisation, Google Docs and Google Sites.

The basic product is free for up to 50 users with a total of around 7GB storage space and is geared toward small enterprise that don’t have the space/capital/expertise to set up this on their own. For operations with more employees the economy of scale becomes more visible especially with regard to the saving on expensive end user license agreements. They even tell you how you might estimate this saving.

Recently, to lure more defectors away from Microsoft, they have provided a synchronisation tool to facilitate migration from Microsoft Outlook. If you’re a small business with a registered domain name then Google Apps will provide you with mail server and storage capability in your own domain name.
Google Apps is based on the free to use development framework Google Apps Engine which competes with cloud development platforms such as Amazon AWS , Microsoft Azure and others viz. Ubuntu . These tools allow businesses with development expertise to connect their own cloud based services tailored to the needs of their business such as e-commerce, online payments etc. What sets Google Apps apart is that it seems to be the only cloud based application that is ready-to-use without prior assembly and development.

In this light hearted but insightful treatment the scientist Simon Wardley of Ubuntu/Canonical outlines the circumstances that have brought about ‘The Cloud’ in a way that seems to assert its inevitability .

However, absent from his talk is the subject of data protection and client confidentiality, a big consideration when contemplating migrating to the cloud.
Relinquishing direct physical control over your businesses documentation flow is not a decision to be taken lightly. What assurances do Google give regarding the security of your data?

A read over of the Terms of Services for Google Accounts would suggest that you in fact agree to allow Google to do what they like with this data. See section 11 here.

Obviously some lee-way is necessary for the management of data within a colossal organisation like Google who rely on numerous third parties to sustain and provide the services. However the text seems to give Google carte blanche to allow anyone they deem suitable to see your data without notifying you who or when. It appears that beyond mere data administration their intention is to use the data to drive directed marketing and they do make specific mention of providers of ’syndicated services’ and this has caused alarm

So can your data ‘fall into the wrong hands’? A few more factors would need to conspire for this to happen. For instance the ‘wrong hands’, be they the competition, the revenue commissioner or your ex-partner, would need to know the Google cloud had your data. Then, by what deft feat of social engineering would they penetrate the Google fortress? How would they know where to look?
Though difficult, these are not impossibilities and may well plant a doubt in the mind of otherwise enthusiastic cloud converts.

Also supposing you wish to at some time in the future bring it all back in-house again or go to an alternative cloud. What mass exporting facilities do google provide? In the case of mail it would seem possible to synchronise to and external IMAP mail client but Google Docs there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get at your data back in bulk quickly. This is a shortcoming that Google would need to address if they don’t want clients to compare them to banks in the sense of how easy it is to lodge but not so easy to withdraw. To allay management concerns over relocating data to an unknown offsite location Google should do everything possible to ensure the level of control over that data remains undiminished.

So once again it would appear there’s no free lunch. Gartner exposes a few other problems in its report condensed here.

Cloud providers will have to address these issues to encourage uptake in their service. I had contacted Google to discuss these points and get some more clarity but at the time of writing they had yet to get back to me. This will be the subject of a follow-up article so watch this space!

In the meantime if you can tolerate these shortcomings the fact that you can get going at zero cost and scale up from there makes Google Apps a worthwhile option for modest sized operations in these hard pressed times

Read the follow up to this post >>

Diarmuid Keane © 2009

Sunday Business Post article

This is where an experienced IT practitioner can come in. Someone who is aware of technology trends and someone who has the ability to review your current IT spend as a business. A practitioner who will examine each element of your spend, who will review alternatives both in terms of suppliers and service provision and in terms of maximizing the impact of your existing spend. Someone who will guide you in utilizing your spend to achieve more business impact.

Via Consulting recently enabled a client to switch from two existing providers to a single provider utilising a single technology platform. This exercise has resulted in our client moving from two basic customer web portals to a single portal, a more modern and adaptable platform as well as a lower administration overhead. It also has enabled them to use the new platform as a significant sales tool as it is modern and can be branded for a client with ease. The client has a lower annual cost and a more potent business offering with a modest once off setup charge.

Re-evaluating your IT and technology investments does not necessarily mean significant costs but can mean a significant impact on your business’ bottom line.