Oz Analytics

Forrester's Empowered Era

Earlier this week I attended a seminar delivered by Forrester, the global research company. This was my first ever Forrester event, but I have been an enthusiastic consumer of their marketing, collaboration and information management research for some time. So I was keen to see what they offered 'live'. The event was entitled "Welcome To The Empowered Era" and promised analysts Ted Schadler (US), Mark Mulligan (UK), together with Australian analysts, Tim Sheedy and Steven Noble.

The seminar is built around the book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. Here is a bit of the 'shtick' from the website:

"Your customers constantly use groundswell technologies like social, mobile, and video to connect and share information. The only way your organization can support these empowered customers is by empowering your workforce with the same technologies.

In their book, Empowered, Forrester's own Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler provide real-world examples of how innovative leaders — and their teams — have harnessed the groundswell to solve the problems of empowered customers."

I haven't read the book yet, but Ted's contribution to the seminar was pretty impressive. The micro-site around the book also features a blog that I recommend. That brings me to the seminar itself, and I would like some feedback if possible.

So what were my impressions? The analysts are smart guys - Forrester is full of them - so their research set my expectations high. I did gain insights around the need to empower employees so they can better meet empowered customers. So the day was well spent and I appreciated hearing from the four analysts. But if we are talking about empowering, as a customer of Forrester I felt/feel a little frustrated that I wasn't more empowered. Why? Well it comes down to expectations. The seminar cost a couple of thousand dollars, and yet the Empowered book itself (US$18.45 on Amazon) was not included, and only 2 of the presentations were down-loadable after the event.

So tell me, am I being petty and unreasonable? I can live with 'whiny', so please drop me a line with your comments! I will be interested to see if Forrester is also listening to their empowered customer ...

The State of Analytics Across Asia

Further to my last blog, I have collected my facts and thoughts into a year-end overview of Asia in 2009. Here's a round-up of developments that I noted over the last 12 months. There were many more that you can access by using the CORTEX, but several key events are listed below.

What are common trends across the region?

• A V-shaped market recovery is predicted in the 2010 BI market.
• The leading tech companies have created analytic centres of excellence across Asia. If you engage a major vendor or consultancy then it is likely that you will be leveraging Indian or Chinese IP.
• Low-cost and innovative reporting and analytic solutions are winning worldwide accolades. Strong sales across the region will continue and price sensitive buyers in Western markets will begin to take notice.

Notable Events in 2009

January

Accenture India said it planned to hire 8,000 people by the end of 2009, which will take its total workforce in India to 50,000. “We believe that analytics is going to be an important trend that our customers are going to demand from us. We think India is going to be a great place for us. We have some core centres of excellence in the analytics space in the country,” said William D Green, chairman and CEO of the firm that employs 177,000 people globally.

April

SAP Opens Co-Innovation Lab in Bangalore. Joins existing labs in Palo Alto, California, and Tokyo, Japan. Work has concentrated on delivering workflow and mobility solutions.

May

Analytics tools are becoming more vital to outsourcers -especially quality monitoring and performance management products. Agent Performance Optimisation (APO) products have become vital as outsourcers strive to differentiate themselves competitively and cut costs for their clients.

June

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) launched a new business intelligence solution for hospitals and health care sector. The company today said in a press release that it has developed an out of the box dashboard that will simplify projects, cut cost and dramatically shorten time to value related services to both hospital administration and patients care.

Ramco Systems in India introduced a corebanking analytics solution aimed at addressing Business Intelligence (BI) needs of banks. The analytics solution packaged and delivered with HP s Neoview Appliance box will be based on Ramco s Decisionworks software framework. 

Chinese telecom operators reportedly spent US$1.18 bln on their business and operation support systems in 2008, up 26.8 percent year-on-year and a significant portion of this was reportedly on business intelligence.

China Mobile is working on a back end system based on cloud computing technology, which it has dubbed "Big Cloud". This includes data mining systems for China Mobile's mobile search service and a business intelligence system to track user behavior.

August

IBM Analytics Centre in Beijing. IBM announced last August that it would open an advanced business analytics centre in Beijing that will serve clients including the Chinese government. This centre joins a worldwide network of others in cities such as Berlin, Tokyo, London, New York and Washington, D.C. China was the first to be based in a developing country.

The company has stated that the China centre will at first focus on products aimed at traffic, water and electrical grid management.

"A major stimulus opportunity in China, transportation infrastructure such as new high speed trains, a hugely expanded rail network and faster links between the country's major cities are in development. This center will bring together research experts, major universities, partners and clients to develop best practices for rail systems that are smarter, more efficient, greener and attractive for travelers all around the globe."

They also said that other centres are planned in China.

Activities by the centre have included:

• Building a cloud computing platform in the city of Dongying (in the Yellow River Delta) as a model for how local government and businesses can modernize in China. Chinese economic stimulus funds are fueling the project, which is expected to be duplicated in other cities. The Yellow River Delta Cloud Computing Center will serve as a central platform for developing software that automates the petroleum production supply chain. It will be used to expand e-government services in Dongying and will serve as a technology center through which Chinese software engineers will supply outsourcing services. Clients for the first of three planned phases include Sanyo and Dupont. In the second phase the Dongying City Government will use cloud software to supply government services and administer "a smart airport, smart parks, and smart railroads.". A third phase would extend into the cities health care services.
• In September it was announced that IBM, the City of Shenyang, and China's Northeastern University were embarking on a major "smart city" collaboration effort focused on enabling Shenyang to improve the lives of its citizens by meeting its environmental responsibility goals.

"The Collaboratory will focus on advancing technology solutions that: significantly reduce carbon emissions, conserve energy, manage water efficiently, effectively track food from farm to fork, enhance the intelligence of transportation and traffic systems, create environmental emergency response plans, and allow a proactive approach to environmental responsibility vs. reactive."

• It is known that local telco China Mobile Communications Corporation has been working closely with IBM's China Telecommunications Solutions Center to deploy a  business intelligence platform that supports service creation, deployment, execution, integration and management. IBM claims that China Mobile is now able to reduce time-to-market for new products, increase revenue and improve customer service with end-to-end monitoring and analysis. It is not known if the business analytics centre in Beijing is involved.

The Beijing center will employ up to 300 consultants, mathematicians and software specialists at first and recruit or retrain up to 300 more as demand grows. It is unclear if any of these are new jobs but a portion are 'reassigned' existing IBM consultants and scientists.

September

IBM Business Analytics Centre of Competency in Bangalore, India. It's focus will be on Web 2.0 Analytics, Risk and Fraud Analytics, Financial Analytics, Customer Analytics and Enterprise Business Analytics Strategy. It also appears to have more of a regional focus whereas the Beijing centre looks to be focussed exclusively on the domestic Chinese market.

IBM acquires RedPill Solutions. A privately-held company headquartered in Singapore. RedPill provides advanced customer analytics services to businesses in industries such as financial services, telecommunications, technology and hospitality. RedPill is a specialist customer management services firm with significant expertise in areas such as churn management, segment propositions, segmentation, risk management and market/opportunity assessment. RedPill has delivered engagements across in 17 different countries in Asia Pacific and the Middle East and has offices in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the United Arab Emirates.

November

QlikTech named Asian Rising Star. The Business Intelligence software vendor, has been named by MIS Asia Magazine as a Rising Star in its annual Strategic 100 IT vendors. QlikTech now has 650 customers and over 50 partners in Asia Pacific.

December

Neteeza Opens in China. The company opened a Sales (they call it a Proof of Concept) Center in Beijing. Their existing presence includes Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia.

Alterian opens a full-service operation in Singapore, expanding from their initial APAC presence in Sydney.

MAIA Intelligence wins Red Herring Top 100 Award. MAIA is an Indian startup that produces a low cost but powerful BI software suite. The company was founded in 2006, has grown rapidly with over 10,000 users of 1KEY BI products. It has also been featured in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for ICT in India 2008 & BI Trend Report 2008-09 APAC.

Tata Consultancy Services is a Gartner leader. TCS is placed in the leaders quadrant for the 'Magic Quadrant for Oracle Outsourcing, North America'.

Outsourcing Your Data Warehouse

I was intrigued by a recent post on the CORTEX about Optus signing a three year deal with HP Enterprise Services (formerly EDS) to outsource several core applications including the data warehouse. I don't have much more detail than that but my first thought was to wonder about the wisdom of an organisation outsourcing core capabilities like analytics.

Later on I thought a little more about this and I wondered if my first reaction was wrong - and hence this post.

I believe that an ability to compete on information (i.e. analytics) is a core capability that many firms have to possess to succeed. Does that mean that they also have to keep in-house all their information management activities? Is the entire information chain from source to decision a core activity? Or can you outsource the data warehouse/data stores and still be good at 'doing analytics'?

I don't have any hard evidence either way so I will make a judgement call and say no. What's my justification for this? Here's my logic:

• A warehouse is a lot more than a place to store data. Building and operating one means that you learn a lot about your data, how it is used operationally, what it is - and frequently what it is not. I'm talking here about the quality of your data and the insight that this knowledge gives you about the soundness of the data you use to make decisions.
• The people that make ETL happen can also tell you a lot about what really goes on in your transactional applications and business processes. The best ETL and data warehouse experts I have worked with have always had a fantastic ability to support business people and ensure that they become better information users.

Sure, you still gain insight from your analytic activities that make use of the data warehouse but I would worry about the impact of outsourcing on my business decision makers ability to access the knowledge locked in the (HP) ETL and data warehousing team.

This may not be as important in organisations with well developed MDM infrastructure that robustly captures and makes available this information to the business. I'm pretty sure that few such organisations exist today.

So Optus will (presumably) save some dollars in the short term but as the months go by the hidden costs associated with less insight will greatly outnumber these. Ultimately, this may all be a moot point as based on discussions I have had with Optus BI staff over the years, as an organisation, they do not seem to be very good at analytics anyway. A lot of good analytics people have left Optus over the years and they all seemed to be frustrated at the inability to make an impact on this.

I'm also aware of the irony of my opinion being based on 'experience' when I spend my career advocating fact-based decision making. So let's just keep this post between you and me. OK?