One view to bind them all
One view to bind them all
May/June Edition, 2008: TechnoloyOne, a leading Australian provider of enterprise business software solutions, released its BI solution in Ferbruary. Peter Gill, General Manager Business Intelligence (BI) explores the development.
TechnologyOne’s decision to provide its customers with a BI solution was primarily driven by two factors.
Firstly we recognised that traditional ERP solutions were not addressing the needs of businesses to be able to capture data in a meaningful way and to provide useful information which forms the basis of strategic decision-making. Secondly, we understood that in today’s environment, more and more businesses and government organisations need the ability to source and analyse business data simply in order to gain a competitive advantage, or in the case of government organisations, run a more efficient operation and better deliver outputs to their stakeholders.
When our customers told us they needed to move beyond just reporting on data and that other third party solutions weren’t cutting it, we responded by releasing our BI solution. The feedback to date A successful BI solution needs to be able to gather and present data from across an organisation. To do this, traditional third party solutions need to have an understanding of the other business systems and the underlying data process before it can even begin to produce any meaningful information.
Worst case scenarios of BI implementations can result in implementation processes which drag on for years. This process can be extremely laborious. Data has to be restructured?so it can be ‘read’ by the traditional third party BI solutions; then warehoused?prior to any true ‘intelligence’ being produced. This leads to heavy implementation costs just to understand and restructure the underlying data. Then when the solution finally goes live it may not fulfil the expectations of the customer, because their expectations have evolved since they were originally identified.
TechnologyOne’s BI solution is different. Designed with the end-user in mind and delivered ‘data aware’ (because it runs over TechnologyOne products for which we have total control) customers benefit from rapid implementation and the ability to draw data from across their organisation and aggregate it in a user friendly dashboard. Because the solution goes live so rapidly, feedback is immediate. This enables constant refinement where small adjustments can be made on an ongoing basis rather than reaching the end of a six month implementation process before making major changes.
We are able to achieve this rapid implementation because we ship our solution with the metadata layer already in place ‘out-of-the-box’. In addition and we have optimised many of our solutions. For example, many customers use the flexibility of our Financials solution as a form of data warehousing in itself, with other products sending summarised information to Financials and using the optimised reporting capabilities of this solution to generate the relevant information.
The ability of the users to change and adapt the solution eliminates the need for technical support from highly costed consultants to configure the system. The accounting or operations department can configure the solution to meet their requirements and continue to do so even when businesses restructure or change its reporting requirements or there are legislative changes to manage.
We recognise that staff members within an organisation need different things from a system, depending on what their job entails. We provide the tools to make this a reality.
Our Connected Intelligence (Ci) platform, on which all of our solutions have been developed, allows?organisations to take advantage of desktop integration by combining the best from both Web and Windows applications, while enabling greater functionality within applications such as email?and spreadsheets.
Knowledge Management (KM)
Put simply, knowledge management is the experience and knowledge of an organisation’s intellectual assets; its customers, partners, employees, data files, documents, business processes and the knowledge about customers, markets, competitors and industry. There is significant capital embedded in them which is human, organisational and relationship capital rather than financial.
The challenge for organisations is knowing how to use and access this data in a form which is understandable. TechnologyOne’s fully integrated solutions have the capability to pull together information from disparate systems, including HR & Payroll, Works & Assets and Financials. All of which help streamline business activities and maintain the bottom line.
Gathering this information together in one place provides users with a valuable ‘birds eye view’ of their organisation and?puts the data users require to make strategic decisions directly in their hands.
By exposing a solution to users in a way that allows?them to explore and create new views?of information, TechnologyOne is opening their world to exactly what can be achieved with BI. They are also no longer limited by the data that is fed to them by the IT department.
This is the essence of knowledge management because end users are now able to define what they want to see and this can be shared throughout?an organisation.