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Wednesday, 22 May 2013 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Shabiya Ali Ahlam
While the window to business intelligence is usually provided through an executive dashboard, it is quite surprising to note that just a handful of companies in Sri Lanka recognises this fact. Speaking to officials of CAMMS Group in Sri Lanka, it is understood that just 20% of companies have interactive dashboards that support ‘limited’ slicing and dicing of data. Of the remaining 80%, 40% of companies have analytical dashboards that offer minimal interactivity via drill-down and drill through activities, whereas the other 40% have static dashboards that allow minimal interactivity that is basically a minor improvement compared to paper reports.
TechTarget.com reveals that when looking at factors driving an organisation’s planned spending on business intelligence, analytics and corporate performance management, topping the lists is operational efficiency, improving customer service, and having access to competitive advantage. Justifying the need of a fully fledged dashboard with numbers, a presentation by CAMMS revealed that there is a 7% increase from 2012 that solidifies business intelligence and analytics as the fourth largest application software segment. While it highlighted that by 2013 33% of business intelligence functionality will be consumed via handheld devices, by 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities. CAMMS also pointed that by the end of 2013, 15% of business intelligence deployments will combine business intelligence, collaboration, and social software into decision making environments.
To take into account the mentioned factors, according to CAMMS an ideal executive dashboard should have the features of empowering business users to ask and receive information on their business operations in an understandable form, allowing IT to provide ‘personalised’ view of required information, allowing business to have graphical presentation of data and extract information from multiple disparate systems. CAMMS, an Australian based company that has its roots deep in corporate performance management, states that if an organisation’s dashboard does not entail the mentioned features, what they have is probably a glorified online version of a paper report and not a true executive dashboard.
To gain better insights on the importance of dashboards in day-to-day business activities, the Daily FT spoke to CAMMS Country Head for Sri Lanka Lavi De Silva, and CAMMS Business Intelligence and Database Architech Dinesh Priyankara.
Following are excerpts of the interview:
Q: Tell us about the presence of CAMMS in Sri Lanka?
Silva: We have been in Sri Lanka for quite some time and our business focus has been on going after markets that are dominant in Australia, New Zealand and now America. When I came here about a year ago, I saw a huge value and potential in this technology in Sri Lanka. We so far haven’t had a single rejection in Sri Lanka with our products. In some sense I am surprised with the kind of response I got. My initial plan was to have a few companies in Sri Lanka and quickly move to the rest of the region.
Q: Your primary focus is on dashboards, how well are they used in Sri Lanka?
Silva: Most of the dashboards used in the country are made up of Microsoft Excel. So nearly everyone has a dashboard, but the richness and how much they actually get from it is not much. It has information and probably adds some value, but the companies could do with better.
Q: In the current context, how do companies actually get about developing a dashboard?
Silva: In Sri Lanka most companies build their dashboard in-house. The CEO always asks the IT department if they can cater to his requirement and they take it up. They cannot really cater to that need since this requires technical expertise. The information, data and variables that are to be fed into a dashboard needs to be thought out in different angles to get the maximum benefit. Also it is thought that doing this task in-house reduces the expenditure of the organisation. It doesn’t, since when you consider what is lost due to limited information, the cost incurred is quite high compared to what you would spend when developing a fully-fledged dashboard with a specialised company such as CAMMS, which delivers the information you require and that too within the time you require it.
Priyankara: Companies need to realise that a comprehensive dashboard cannot be developed by in-house IT specialists. Even if they do, should any issue rise from it, they will have to reach out to someone who is an expert in the area to rectify the issue.
Q: So have you been reached by clients for similar scenarios?
Priyankara: Well, companies will soon realise that their requirements have not been fulfilled. So they will have to come to organisations such as ours. We have been reached by few, for which we have taken up and delivered what they require. When they compare what they have and what we have developed for them, they see how much more they can actually get from a well-designed dashboard.
Q: You mentioned cost reduction. Could you talk about the affordability factor?
Priyankara: We are not saying that we are inexpensive, but we are affordable.
Silva: The affordability is an interesting factor. Say that an organisation is paying for their IT personnel for three years, along with providing resources and tools needed for development which are not cheap. That is a lot that they are taking over since merely purchasing the necessary tools for development does not get you what you want. Most of the software vendors make it look so easy to use and develop systems using their software, but it’s not. As I previously said, these require technical expertise to make the best out of it. The point is that, despite spending so much and thinking you are reducing your IT spend, what you end up with is mediocre results. For us this is intelligence and it is just one part of our story.
Q: So what are the other activities CAMMS is involved in?
Silva: We get a lot of calls for help with regard to driving business and operational strategies. For example, driving your car without a speedometer is probably not smartest thing to do. It’s worse when you are driving a car without other indicators; such as fuel levels, signals, etc. But when you get into your vehicle, you have the route in mind. So basically decisions are made regarding the journey before you start driving. The dashboard in the vehicle tells you and gives indications regarding speed, fuel remaining and other aspects that are important. So when customers call us, they are basically telling us that they want to make a journey. That’s where the conversation starts and leads to questions on what Key Performance Indicators they are looking for, amongst others. By talking to us, they understand that they need a good dashboard to monitor their performance, progress and other key elements that will help them reach their goals and targets. This comes naturally when we have a conversation about driving business strategy.
Q: What exactly is the company into?
Silva: What we actually help to do is to drive businesses while mitigating the risks that come along the way. It’s common dialogue during meetings on how to grow further and be the best in what you are doing. This gets recorded somewhere, probably in a spreadsheet, and then relevant activities get assigned to various leaderships. Basically they are coming up with a strategy that meets their objective. However, no matter what direction is taken, there will be constant disruption and certainly not everything goes as planned. And this is what we help do. We build a business execution engine that sits on top of what traditionally would be big financial HR and other systems.
Q: What are the trends in the business development software?
Silva: The concept of self-service. Looking at the basic definition of a dashboard, which is to present information from one or more data sources, we note that most companies do not really have dashboards that even fulfil the definition. 40% of companies have a static dashboard, whereas another 40% has an analytical dashboard that offers minimal interactivity via limited drill-down and drill trough capabilities, and only 20% have interactive dashboards that support limited slicing and dicing of data. Not having a fully-fledged dashboard actually limits the ability of senior management to make effective and timely decisions. Our opinion is that effectively and timely decisions can be made only if one can have easy and instant access to critical information. This we cater through our dashboard that is self-service and user friendly.
Q: Are you saying that nearly 80% of companies do not actually have a dashboard though they think they do?
Silva: Certainly. Today when a CEO wants something, he has to call someone and tell them his requirement. They have to go back and create an interface which they can look at. They will abstract it from their view, but not the fact. So there will be a lot going on behind the scene just to get the CEO some numbers. Tomorrow if he asks for information from a new dimension, the same scenario repeats, and this is the norm. What this means is that instead of having a good system, they have online versions of glorified paper reports.
Q: And CAMMS offers an exceptional system?
Silva: Definitely. We will give the latest greatest system where the CEO himself should be able to extract what he wants within minutes or even seconds. The self-serving can be done by just anyone for him as well. And what we mean by self-serving is that a non-IT person can use and interact with the dashboard. Now the question asked by CEOs is not how much sales have been achieved, it is how much more sales can be achieved and through whom. We help organisations get answers those questions.
Priyankara: Our dashboards allow you to do things as you want and organise the information as you want as well. It gives room for executives to figure out the happenings of their businesses at a glance. Our dashboard also allows new dimensions to be incorporated into the systems. For example, you want to know sales on particular day, it’s obviously possible. If you want sales trends on a particular weekday and at a particular time, we can incorporate it. It you want the impact of weather conditions on sales trends, we can feed the information to the data warehouse so you can have access to information from this angle as well. In addition to this, our dashboard also allows to track the progress and performance of staffs. It shows how much one has contributed to the set goals for better measures and management. The dashboard we develop helps to look at a business from a 360 degree view.
Q: Would you say that CAMMS offers a complete cycle?
Silva: Yes. We believe that corporate performance management and business intelligence goes hand in hand. The next frontier in self-service business intelligence is taking it to the next level since it all about the speed of the engine for which the gears are analytics, insights, plans, strategies, actions, execution, results and data. It’s about having a system that is highly integrated with business intelligence.
Q: Who do you identify as your competitors?
Silva: That’s quite interesting actually. The market we fall under is actually quite crowded with companies who claim to offer the best service, while that might only be offering a small percentage of what they claim to extend. CAMMS falls into a unique niche where our competitors would be email systems, phones and spread sheets. It’s the gap between the client and the system.
