SUBU

Actionable Business Enterprise Architecture

By Pavan Inabathini

Summary

Any organization in the world whether it is a For-Profit or Non-Profit organization, would like to be an efficient organization doing its job better, faster and cheaper. Doing things better, faster and cheaper means continually evolve and transform to the new efficiency levels and standards.  Continuous evolution and transformation is not an easy task to accomplish. It requires great minds and great leaders to align strategy, human resources and technology to effectively support and execute business functions of the organization.

During last 20 years Information Technology (IT) has become the most important contributor to successfully transform the way everyone does business. IT is still helping businesses, governments to transform themselves in to lean and effective organizations.  However, the transformation has not been completely smooth or 100% successful in the past.

With the rapid change on how we do business using IT as a facilitator and optimizer, organizations did learn a few lessons from this experience. The most important lesson is, during transformation, the necessity to tightly collaborate between strategy, business and IT and to avoid hands off approach at any cost by these three components.  A sound methodology must be employed to help organization in this scenario to tightly integrate strategy, business and IT in the transformation and evolution process so that organization can effectively execute a cohesive strategy.

Business Enterprise Architecture (BEA) is a methodology and a process that will create conducive environment for strategy, business and IT to tightly collaborate to achieve efficiencies in the transformation that were not possible in the past. Establishing BEA is critical to any organization as there is a strong need to achieve efficiencies and cost savings. BEA can be effectively launched and implemented as we would use same resources but achieve greater efficiencies.

There are four steps that are mentioned later in the document that need to be immediately executed to setup a sustainable and actionable BEA. These four steps will create BEA steering group, BEA group and BEA support group and identify the job functions and structure for the above groups. As mentioned before, BEA can be implemented with no additional resources as most of the job functions that BEA requires are already done by the strategy, business and IT components but less cohesively.

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Actionable Business Enterprise Architecture

Business Intelligence (BI) Cloud

By Pavan Inabathini

Summary

Federal Agencies currently maintain Business Intelligence (BI) solutions across numerous departments around the enterprise with individual deployments.

Departmental BI applications provide valuable information to senior executives, managers regarding human capital, finance, contingency operations, Corporate balance score card etc. These solutions are being deployed individually with each instance requiring initial start-up costs including hardware, software and skills plus ongoing operations costs. Lack of standardization and proliferation of these deployments not only makes delivery of information inefficient for the user but also drives the costs higher than a centralized cohesive strategy.

An agency wide BI strategy must be employed for centralizing and delivering information as a service.  Cloud computing concepts can be effectively utilized to create BI cloud as a core concentrated service approach to provide BI software to the business unit as a service.   This approach still preserves the business unit’s control to own and manage their BI solution and facilitates business unit’s intent to execute BI initiatives much faster.

BI Cloud would also enable agencies to consolidate deployments and enable the growth of a common set of skills that can be applied through out enterprise.  Consolidation of BI deployments would greatly reduce the license redundancies. For example a senior executive who needs access to Human Capital, Balance Score Card, and Contingency Operations would be utilizing 3 Cognos licenses as three applications are individually deployed.  Consolidation of the deployment will help cut down the required 3 licenses to 1.

BI Cloud aligns governance, innovation, cost savings, value, collaboration and operational excellence ultimately executing agency’s business strategy.

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BI Cloud – Software as a Service

Business Intelligence (BI) Infrastructure
By Pavan Inabathini

The same post can be found at Government Shared Services

A BI infrastructure consists of 3 main pillars:

Data – Without data, what’s the point of business intelligence? There are 2 types of data that go hand in hand.

• Data captured from your business processes and needed for performance metrics.
• Standard definitions and descriptions of the data and performance metrics that is being captured.

The second, standard definitions (and associated business rules), is often overlooked when organizations design a business intelligence system. Without standard definitions, days in one report mean business days but in another report it means calendar days depending on who authored the report. This creates seeming inconsistencies that cast doubt on the integrity of the data and undermines the shared services’ organization’s reputation for transparency.

Information Delivery – This pillar addresses how the information is delivered to the user of the data. It relates to the usability and functionality of the user interface needed to consume and analyze the information. Self-service functionality is absolutely critical for a robust business intelligence infrastructure. Users must be able to search, create, analyze, and share information and insights any time, any place. Without knowledge of the underlying query language.

Information Security – This pillar addresses the need to secure the information while making the information available to users on a need to know basis. There are a few key challenges that must be overcome in this area

• User management – an audit process must be in place to ensure information is being delivered on a need-to-know basis. Access to information should be restricted by the user’s role and responsibility in the organization. User accounts should be deleted promptly when a user leaves the organization. Likewise, when a user’s role in the organization changes, you may need to reconfigure the user’s access to information to reflect the new responsibilities.
• Encryption – encrypt all information that is being pulled from the information delivery mechanism as an added measure of safety from information pirates.
• Authentication – validate the identity of the user. This requires striking a delicate balance between protecting the information from unauthorized access and making the information easily available to authorized users.

Each of these pillars of business intelligence could be expounded on with ever increasing attention to details. For example, under information delivery, we could discuss portability as more and more workers need to access BI from mobile devices. We could also talk about tips and tricks for speeding up the delivery of information even when complex queries are executed. Under information security we could talk about better ways to protect information from intruders whose methods become more sophisticated as our means of protecting the data evolve, and vice versa.

I was reading this IBM Global CIO Study from IBM. Very Informative.

This study stresses a current and growing need for intelligence through information integration, predictive insight.

Link to the study is provided at the bottom. Thanks to IBM for writing such a wonderful document. Here are the few excerpts.

Value Integrators — Finance organizations have both a high level of efficiency and an expanded capacity to provide meaningful business insights that meet the new challenges – and opportunities – being raised across the enterprise.

Value Integrators are skilled at navigating uncertainty; and on every measure we examined – revenue growth, EBITDA and return on invested capital – their enterprises outperformed their peers. They do so in large part because they excel at integrating information company wide , analyzing it and converting it to a competitive asset – new intelligence. Their more forward-looking insights are applied across the enterprise from strategic planning to operational optimization  and are used to manage risk, reduce costs and spot new opportunities.

In short, Value Integrators have stepped up to a new role – to help the business make all manner of enterprise-wide decisions better, faster and with more certainty of intended outcomes. This is the potential unleashed by a smarter  planet, taking information in a complex and volatile environment and providing predictive insights that give the company a competitive edge. Yet our study also shows that too many Finance organizations have yet to seize this opportunity – or meet their own expectations.

Here is the link  http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/gbs-2010cfostudy.html

SUBU  values collaborations and partnerships.  SUBU has been approved  as IBM Business Partner as a  IBM Cognos  Services Provider. We  are looking forward to this exciting relationship and to complement our services to IBM’s.

SUBU solutions answer the full spectrum of Business Intelligence challenges for the capture, storage and security of critical performance metrics data. And we employ proven applications to help you successfully and cost-effectively launch performance management initiatives.

We represent a solid experience in helping organizations execute enterprise wide Business Intelligence initiatives in Human Capital Management. Many organizations have put quality of  Human Capital / Workforce  as their first priority. Metrics such as Quality of new hires, Retention of  highly skilled new hires, Skills Gap Assessment, Retirement planning and Analysis  often featured in executive balance score card dashboard. There is wealth of information that can effectively utilized not only by the business units regarding human capital but also by Human Resources department to make their business processes efficient such as cutting the length of hiring process.  Ability to help you in this area is our specialty.

Today, Organization’s performance initiatives require greater visibility into all corners of the business. Business intelligence has become a central element to every part of the business and it must be used as a vehicle to exploit niche in the market.

Organizations of all sizes depend on meaningful, right-time information about customers, sales, production, internal operations, finances, etc. This is more than data; it is data that has been massaged and analyzed into business intelligence (BI), designed to support decision-making and performance management processes.

The most important executive decisions require business intelligence from across the organizations, which is why the demand for BI has become so intense. As pressure increases to boost organization’s performance, there is demand for greater visibility into the continuously changing metrics of corporate processes.

Welcome to SUBU.

Organizations constantly face a challenge to effectively use IT work force to develop and manage business technology solutions to execute business processes. It has been proven that business technology does make business processes efficient and cut down waste. But, inadequate quality of IT work force, every evolving technologies, lack of objective method of assessing the ROI on technology  are some of the reasons that makes it much harder for the organizations to be a front runner.

SUBU has been formed to provide a conducive environment for Organizations to find business technology solutions which are efficient, and realize a clear return on investment.

How can we help you?, Please shoot us an email to info@subullc.com