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MicroStrategy Implementation

February 23rd, 2010
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Background

In this case study we describe how a leading specialty retailer achieved a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics through Systech’s MicroStrategy implementation. The MicroStrategy implementation supported business users to analyze sales and inventory to identify key trends and opportunities.

To accommodate their expanding business the client sought a platform to support complex data analysis that is user friendly. Formerly they depended on time consuming and less efficient POS System.

After evaluating several Business Intelligence vendors, they chose Systech Solutions Inc. to meet their needs for identifying the key trends and making informed decisions. Systech Solutions, Inc. was assigned to design an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for them in this regard.

Challenges

The client required a detailed access into a variety of business data to allow the business community to analyze their data in greater depth. To offer a simplified and integrated solution for a profitable growth Systech had to address certain challenges.

  • To track trends and identify opportunities. Since the data was spread across disparate systems it was a laborious process.
  • To manage overwhelming amounts of data from various sources—and turning it into reliable business intelligence that enabled better business outcomes.
  • To effectively design EDW for consolidated reporting both from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft.
  • To configure and implement a scalable tool to query the EDW and to create reports.
  • To build a system that would distribute reports with in a 24 hour window every month.
  • To provide a platform that could keep up with constantly evolving user requirements.

Solution

Systech Solutions fashioned a business intelligence environment that comprised of a Netezza data warehousing infrastructure, a DataStage ETL environment and a MicroStrategy reporting environment.

The Systech team successfully achieved the extraction, transformation and loading of the source data into a data mart schema through an ETL process. The team made sure that the information was accurate, consistent, and optimally organized for complex analysis. The EDW was effectively designed for consolidated reporting from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft. Since the source data was stored in individual schemas, the transformation strategy included consolidation of information which was common to all source systems. A user-friendly OLAP data model was successfully created to store pre-aggregated data for fast ad-hoc query performance.

MicroStrategy reporting tool was configured to query the EDW and to create reports. The Systech team developed dashboards that included scorecards to allow any type of key performance indicators (KPIs) to be rolled up into a score for a particular application area, overall IT performance, or anywhere in-between. More than 32 to 40 reports were run apart from the templates during the course of the project.

The sales data (KPI’s) was analyzed to:

  • Anticipate the sales margin
  • Analyze the SKU to aggregate (or roll-up) metrics into single overall “score” for IT and the inventory data
  • Visualize store and warehouse inventory
  • Calculate profitability evaluation ratio that analyzes the firm’s ability to turn inventory into cash above the cost of the inventory
  • Study purchase orders and transfers

Result

The MicroStrategy implementation by Systech team provided the client a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics.
Systech developed an easy to use BI application to support their data from the users. The data warehouse was architected to support production reporting.
Multiple areas of their business used the data to manage inventory, identify sales opportunity, recognize key performers and review products.
Systech made it possible to provide customizable user experience and provide executive summary reports, analyze sales promotion and study products sales.
Systech created a robust architecture and a flexible platform. This architecture combined right level of access with required functionality and resulted in a positive user experience.

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Data Warehouse Appliance – The Next Generation Appliances

December 17th, 2009
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Fast emerging and dynamic global economy have made quick and easy access to information. It has become mandatory that organizations understand and respond quickly and appropriately to unanticipated changes in operations and marketplace. Data warehouse appliances make data warehousing simple and powerful. They enable high performance data warehousing at a lower TCO. Using DW appliances businesses can build BI projects that were previously not possible. Many new data warehouse appliance vendors are now extending their products to support more complex workloads that offer additional capabilities and utilities for BI application and are changing the way that business thinks about data warehousing.

This research paper describes the nature, importance and benefits of “Data warehouse (DW) Appliances” and its use for business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW). It also highlights a variety of other aspects concerning DW appliances such as the differentiators among DW appliance products, Total Cost of Ownership, things to remember while reaching a buy decision for DW appliances etc. The report also includes a note on the future of Data Warehouse Appliances in ever changing, dynamic BI industry.

Register here to request the white paper.

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A white paper: Operational BI

November 4th, 2009
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Operational BI represents one of the fastest growing areas of business intelligence. It has the potential to inflate the benefits of BI usage throughout the organization to a user audience that has been unable to benefit from BI technology. It can provide noteworthy benefits, however operational BI must be implemented carefully. It requires a sound and robust underlying infrastructure and database processing environment.

It is important to remember, that most operational BI applications do not call for close to real-time operations, and to facilitate most users would be quite happy if action times can break the 24-hour barrier and help them make intra-day decisions.

Hence a well selected operational BI project will perk up the responsiveness of the organization, whereas at the same time it will also deliver measurable results that produce a sound return on investment.

Register here to request the white paper.

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Improving Behavioral Health Processes and Outcomes

September 4th, 2009
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An interview with Suresh Bangara, MD, CEO of Hippocrates Gate, LLC.

President Obama’s support for electronic medical records is one of the key efforts of healthcare. “This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests” said Obama. “It just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs — it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system” quoted Obama in reference to computerizing all health records within five years to boost the quality of health care for all Americans.

AccessHSI helps HealthCare Providers (HCP’s) and Managed Care Organizations (MCO’s) to manage the administration of mental healthcare. The application enables clinicians to quickly capture complete case information, verify diagnoses, check level of care guidelines in advance, and generate a full report that demonstrates medical necessity. It has been estimated that 80% of healthcare administrative costs can be eliminated by the adoption of improved and automated technologies for data collection, sharing, and decisioning. AccessHSI is designed to help providers improve operational efficiencies, quickly document cases, support diagnoses and suggest level of care.

The application was built by Team Systech collaborating with Medical domain experts from Hipppocrates Gate, LLC. The team was headed by Ramakrishnan Rangananthan acting as the Lead Architect – while the development was headed by Venkataragavan from Systech India. Dr Suresh Bangara captured the essence of multiple years of treating and administering the treatment of mental healthcare – and provided the subject matter expertise for the application.

Dr. Suresh Bangara has more than 20 years of experience in health care industry especially in mentally health. He has worked with mentally ill patients both in public sector as well as private sector. He has been in charge of partial hospitalization programs across the country. Dr. Bangara has also been involved in the start up of a HMO a director for Pro-health plans and has deep understanding of individual, group and hospital practice. For the past 2 years he has been a professor and currently he is the Senior Medical Director at Cigna.

In this BI Insight, we feature an interview with Suresh Bangara, CEO of Hippocrates Gate, LLC. The interview examines his company’s latest application that could potentially revolutionize the health care industry by providing an efficient and cost-effective solution.

BI Insight: What is AccessHSI and what is its role in Behavioral Healthcare?

Dr. Bangara: AccessHSI is a secure web-based decision support application with a reporting tool for Level of Care. It reduces administrative time and denials for mental health and substance abuse inpatient and outpatient cases. It enables clinicians to quickly capture complete case information, verify diagnoses, check level of care guidelines in advance, and generate a full report that demonstrates medical necessity in less than 10 minutes—compared to the 45 minute norm. This allows MCOs, and other health planners to automate most routine care management processes, thereby allowing care managers and Medical Directors to focus on complex and specialty cases. Also it is easily accessible and user-friendly .

BI Insight: What do you think are the core problems with healthcare today?

Dr. Bangara: Lack of proper and complete documentation is the root cause for an expensive and prolonged health care process. Also, there is a huge administration burden on clinicians as they have to also act as care managers and provide all authorizations.

How does your application help overcome these problems?

Dr. Bangara: The reason for most denials is lack of proper documentation or that document does not support the claims of the doctor. Our software recommends objective and accurate healthcare at the right level and at the right time. This will save hospitals most of the administration cost. In addition to efficiently providing complete clinical documentation, our software demonstrates to MCOs, a hospital’s ability to self-manage. Thus it increases reliability and efficiency of the operation. AccessHSI standardizes the diagnosis and suggested level of care.

BI Insight: How does AccessHSI provide consistent care and accommodate a variety of patient conditions?

Dr. Bangara: AccessHSI software asks specific questions across different domains which can be mapped to 7 diagnostic domains covering a 360° view of patient status. These domains are Symptom Severity, Lethality, Psychosocial Support, Functional Impairment, Medical Conditions, Patient Resources and Provider Resources. These questions are answered by the patient or patient’s care takers. Thus, patient’s clinical status is quickly documented across the 7 diagnostic domains and a diagnosis can be verified by a care provider in less than 10 minutes. We allocate a level of care based on a logic that uses information from all 7 domains.

BI Insight: What role did Systech play as a technology partner?

Dr. Bangara: Systech played a key role in automating the process to increase efficiency and lower cost. This enables providers in completing initial patient clinical record and generates a complete report in less than 10 minutes; updates to a record can be completed in less than 3 minutes. Traditionally, 60-80% of the administration costs went to gate-keeping functions which are eliminated by AccessHSI. This reduces millions of dollars spent on gate keeping and makes healthcare affordable for all.

BI Insight: What reporting services and analysis did Systech enable for the application?

Dr. Bangara: Being well equipped in resources and experience to provide Analytics in healthcare, Systech played a key role in developing reporting services and analysis. The output generated by AccessHSI application generates a comprehensive report containing text, domain graphs, DSM. Graphical Display of Severity Index in Seven Domains and helps care managers and providers focus on the domains with high severity for targeted interventions. These outcomes can be measured. The case tracking provides visibility of the changes and improvements in patients, over time and over sessions or in comparison with others.

BI Insight: And how does Systech play a role in Predictive modeling?

Dr. Bangara: Use of Systech’s analytics capabilities enabled Predictive Modeling for us. Predictive modeling in healthcare has the potential to identify cases with increased risk for re-admission. We can compare output of an individual profile across the 7 domains and to profiles of other patients in the database; we determine the level of care that is required. Systech’s ability to help in improving efficiency is widely accepted and Obama administration has stated that they are looking at IT in helping with reducing the costs for providing health care.

Patient information confidentiality is very important in healthcare, how does your application ensure patient confidentiality?

Systech played a very critical part in ensuring that the software is in full compliance with HIPAA guidelines. This is very crucial to keep the data confidential and secure. We chose Systech as our technology partner because we needed an IT partner who understood the importance and criticality of data we gather. Systech is an expert in arranging database administration, design, development and maintenance. Patient module in our software has very sophisticated security privileges. Systech has done a great job in designing and coding this application.

BI Insight: How and why did you choose the name “Hippocrates Gate” for your company?

Dr. Bangara: One of my co-workers brought that up. Hippocrates is the father of modern medicine. AccessHSI is a health status indicator. Health and illness are in continuum; we are able to watch and measure these domains. One of the domains is AccessHSI. Whether you are healthy or ill or severely ill, we constantly measure it. It maps to whatever level of care you need. It is therefore a gateway to different aspects of health. If you are looking at integrated health, you get an insight into diagnostics, predictive modeling, and levels of care. AccessHSI is a bridge- and a gateway to various outcomes of health. That is why we thought it would be apt to call it Hippocrates Gate.

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BI in Healthcare

June 30th, 2009
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Abstract

Healthcare delivery in the United States has been undergoing major changes. Move towards Market driven healthcare, internal and external restructuring of healthcare delivery systems and increasing sophistication of information technology are all key drivers for accelerating the pace of change in recent years.

All players in the Healthcare value chain – Patients, Providers and Payers are impacted by these forces. Today healthcare faces additional challenges, of escalating pharmaceutical costs, labor shortages, questions surrounding quality of care, compliance with regulations (such as HIPPA).

In this paper, we will primarily focus on the issues relevant to Health Provider Organizations and how BI technology and analytics would meet the challenges of regulations, privacy and data volume of healthcare.

Introduction

According to Health Leaders, a health industry publication, more than 150 Provider Organizations across the United States have gone bankrupt or closed in the past ten years due to financial instability. Many more will meet the same fate unless steps are taken immediately to get a better handle on financial performance and improve operational efficiency substantially.

Healthcare Value Chain

1

To meet the challenges and to ensure the long-term viability, Provider organizations require well-designed, efficient, and integrated clinical, administrative, and financial processes, and the ability to make “informed” decisions. The key to designing effective and efficient processes and to making sound decisions is the availability of high quality, integrated information delivered when and where it is needed, in a manner useful to knowledge workers, decision makers, and healthcare consumers.

Opportunities for cost savings in US Healthcare Industry ($ billion)

2

Business Intelligence systems can help Provider Organizations face these challenges

To proactively and more effectively manage information, the provider organizations require a more comprehensive framework – system and processes, than the traditional IT systems. We believe the answer is Business Intelligence. The Gartner group defines Business Intelligence as the process of transforming data into information, and through discovery, transforming that information into actionable knowledge. Thus BI is not a specific technology, or a single data warehouse, or a single analytical application. Business Intelligence is the process that is supported by people, information, and technology for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization.

We have outlined a Business Intelligence Framework for Provider Organizations. BI systems will enable provider organization track utilization, monitor costs and revenue, and develop and live within fixed budgets. Reports and analysis from the business intelligence system will help identify cost trends, patterns and abnormalities and pinpoint financial weak spots. Leadership is then empowered with the knowledge and information to directly influence the performance and bottom line of the organization. A recent survey of senior executives from Healthcare Organizations revealed that Business intelligence systems are primarily used in financial analysis, but increasingly assisting in clinical research, performance measurement, physician profiling and other clinical and operational analyses

Business Intelligence Framework

3

What are Business Intelligence systems used for in your organization?

  • Financial Analysis
  • Operational Analysis
  • Budgeting
  • Cost Accounting
  • Clinical Research
  • Program Development
  • Market Research & Analysis
  • Disease Management
  • Case Management
  • Clinical Reengineering
  • Physician Profiling
  • Supply Chain Management
  • Analytical Customer Relationship Management
  • Physician Profiling
  • Performance Management
  • Case Management
  • Operational Analysis
  • Budgeting
  • Market Research
  • Clinical Reengineering
  • Customer care Analysis
  • Protocol development
  • Risk Management

We will outline below some key areas where Business Intelligence systems will provide direct impact in improving financial and operational performance.

Negotiating Adequate Capitation Rates

Often health plans give physician organizations a monthly per-member fee (capitation fee) for providing care for their members. Health plans also delegate to these groups the responsibility of spending the money, deciding on care, and making payments to physician members. Some industry experts believe that root of provider organizations failure is inadequate capitation rates set by health plans. But, many provider organizations lack the information needed to pinpoint this issue and negotiate better terms with health plans.

Business Intelligence solutions with complete financial and operational data and analytic capabilities can help these organizations to understand the level of contracting and capitation rates at which they will achieve desirable economies of scale and profitability. This will empower the management to negotiate appropriate contract terms with health plans.

Controlling Operational Costs

With escalating healthcare costs, it’s important for provider organizations to understand their flow of expenses and how to control them. Prescription drug prices have gone through double-digit percent increases; Health professionals are in short supply and substantial increases in salary, benefits and bonuses are needed to lure and retain them. Administration of complex health plan contracts necessitates high overhead and administrative costs.

In this environment, it’s more important than ever for provider organizations to monitor their costs closely. Business Intelligence systems will enable the organization to track cost patterns over time and identify areas for reduction for controlling the budget. This is a vital part of financial management and if handled inappropriately, the organization can quickly become financially over extended.

Curtailing Unnecessary Losses

Provider organizations must protect themselves from unnecessary losses, such as treating patients not covered by their group or health plans and having extensive out-of-network referrals to specialists. This cost could be substantial and usually have to be absorbed by provider organizations. Streamlining authorizations, eliminating duplicate claims and preventing treatment of ineligible patients can help save the provider groups large amount of unnecessary losses.

Here again Business Intelligence system will help identify the extent of these losses and bring management attention to these issues. It will help identify the risk group of patients based on historical data and predictive analysis. It can track physicians who are likely to refer out-of-network specialists extensively and allow management to take needed action.

Sharing the Risk with Health Plans (Payers)

Health Plans also realize that their success depends on the survival of well-run provider organizations. Whenever provider organizations go bankrupt and close, all the players in the value chain – patients, physicians, insurers and regulators are all affected as they scramble to ensure the delivery of care. This is a costly proposition to Health Plans. Hence, Health Plans and Managed Care organizations are always concerned about long-term viability of the Provider Organizations that they deal with. They are willing to share the risk with provider groups that have a proven track record of success with these risk-based contracts. They are more committed to paying actuarially sound rates that reflect the actual costs of care to these provider organizations.

A provider organization, with a sound business intelligence system and analytical capabilities that can track costs and control budgets, has a better chance of gaining confidence and trust from health plans, which in turn, paves the way for sharing the risk with them. As a result, provider organization can negotiate better terms and lower the overall financial risk to the organization.

Providing Incentives for High Performers

For the provider organization to succeed, it must motivate individual provider members to control costs and improve on utilization while achieving quality outcomes and high levels of patient satisfaction. How can an organization achieve this objective? It must develop appropriate incentive programs and provide a financial stake to the physicians in improving care, quality, and outcomes while controlling costs. The compensation plan should be structured to encourage physician behaviors that ultimately achieve the organization’s objectives and allow for members to be liable for the same risks as the organization.

Without a properly defined data repository with historical data and analytical system, organizations will be unable to track physician performances over time to implement such a compensation plan. Business intelligence system will provide the data required and the tools needed to analyze and develop appropriate incentive plans and help track the adherence of these plans by individual members.

Alert System for Early Detection of Financial Risks

The recent sudden failures of many provider organizations have shown that these groups did not have early warning system to detect potential risks and take immediate measures. Through business intelligence system, set of key performance measures and metrics could be tracked over time and reported periodically to the CFO and other senior management. These reports could be sent automatically to the designated management members and alerts can be triggered if performance metrics fall below certain threshold values.

Tracking Clinical Outcomes of Different Treatments

We have primarily focused so far on the key financial and operational efficiency improvements that could be achieved by health provider organizations in rapid time frame with the implementation of a sound business intelligence system. But the value of this system is not limited to the financial performance alone. Business Intelligence systems can also help track clinical outcome of different treatment options through historical patient record analysis and provide physicians with the means to better understand the effectiveness of these treatment options. Although treating any one patient will involve a unique combination of complex decisions, aggregating patient populations and examining variations in physician decision-making will yield valuable insights for practitioners.

Customer Relationship Management

The government and patients are demanding that health providers create and improve internal systems to provide better service, minimize errors and improve clinical outcomes. Patients are pushing back at provider systems for accurate and comprehensive record keeping. A healthcare system overwrought with inconsistencies and errors can prevent even the best organization from developing strong relationship with its patients. A business Intelligence system that integrates patient data across the enterprise and make it available at the point-of-service will help provider organizations to improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes- the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

Spending on information technology has been historically low in the healthcare industry and especially so with provider organizations. But, as we noted earlier, provider organizations are facing great challenges than ever before now. Status-qua will only speed up reaching financial dire straits sooner. Provider organizations need to act quickly and invest in appropriate information technology that can immediately help them in identifying financial weak spots and implementing cost control measures. Business Intelligence System has proven to be the key enabling technology that will take all the raw data that is collected in these organizations and turn them into actionable information to empower the leadership to directly influence the bottom-line of the organization.

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Systech’s Outlook on Outsourcing to Emerging India

May 27th, 2009
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“Systech’s outlook on Outsourcing to Emerging India”, a BI Insight Interview with Maruthu Pandian, VP Operations India, Systech India Pvt. Ltd.

Although things look gloomy for the larger global economy, in an economic downturn, cost will trump value considerations. Many organizations that are not outsourcing will consider or move aggressively to outsource their IT or business processes to focus on their core business.

In such a state of fierce competition in outsourcing, what is the Mantra that Systech India is adopting to stay a Strategic leader in Offshore Development? This interview with Maruthu Pandian, Vice President India-Operations, Systech India Pvt. Ltd. discusses Systech’s priorities and expectations in offshore development and Outsourcing to India.

BI Insight: What specifically are your roles in Systech India?

Maruthu: My focus is to encourage innovation, quality management and stream line operations right from identifying talent, developing skill sets to forming project teams. I am also responsible for customer experience and employee satisfaction.

BI Insight: How organized is the Outsourcing Model in Systech India?

Maruthu: Our outsourcing model is built on the three pillars; Integration, Intelligence and Innovation. I call it the 3Is. These are bunch of initiatives that are aimed to help our client achieve their BI strategies.

Integration – we have well structured strategies to efficiently execute processes that provide a seamless platform with the required collaborative tools. This enables all the stake holders; onsite, offshore and our customers to get interconnected and efficiently handle project scenarios particularly those that require some level of collocation.

Intelligence – in this stream we focus on our abilities to mobilize the intelligence created within the company over the years and apply it in every project task to attain excellence.

Innovation – we have devised mechanisms to constantly implement change in the way we deliver our project or create significant new efficiencies.

BI Insight: What is unique about Systech’s Offshore Technology? And how do you deal with the competition?

Maruthu: We offer the best customer experience whether it’s new BI application development or support work. Our offshore technology framework is designed after analyzing the processes from both the customer’s perspective and project team delivery point of view.

BI projects specifically have lot of customer touch points even before the start of the project, during the project and even after the implementation. Our technical consultants handle every touch point with good understanding of the business process that helps to interpret the data and speak customer lingo. This helps them to have a successful handshake at every point.

BI Insight: What are the advantages that Systech’s clients get by using Offshore Technology Center?

Maruthu: One, High success ratio, we have a meticulously designed mechanism that enforces process discipline among offshore project team; this helps us to achieve predictable outcomes.

Two, Ability to scale up, we hold a pool of specialized BI talent across the verticals which help to accelerate the project pace when required.

Three, Uninterrupted Service, proven frameworks like on-demand resource pool and structured transition methodologies help us to provide transparent and round the clock service.

And four, Cost Saving, Utilizing global talent helps us to reduce cost Example, Offshore 2.5 to 1 employee

BI Insight: In reference to outsourcing to India, it is said that the Indians are executers and not creators, how do you like to defend that?

Maruthu: The advantage I see India have is that it is both an executor and a creator depending on the opportunity presented.

As Economies grew, the immediate business opportunities were more of service in nature than innovation. When the outsourcing opportunities sprouted, India Inc. entered the market right on time and delivered IT and ITES services across the globe; being an early bird enabled to position itself as the market leader in global offshore services.

Having picked all the low hanging fruits, India Inc. has already started moving towards innovation track; driven more by market demand than by choice, I would say. Nano car is a classic example of demand-driven innovation.

BI Insight: How do you respond to the changing market conditions?

Maruthu: We are much focused and have a flat organizational structure that gives us the advantage to quickly respond to demanding market conditions.

The recent trend in offshore market is that clients require greater specialization and a clear view of what offshore consultants do. Our expertise enables us to provide analytics for every business function which is more customer specific than industry specific. Using collaborative tools systems (MS SharePoint and Wiki) and application sharing software provides greater visibility to our process.

BI Insight: Please elaborate on how Vtrain has helped serve Systech’s offshore development center (ODC)?

Maruthu: Vtrain is an in-house built web-based application that helps to identify resource for project deployment, monitor the training programs and organizational talent development. Vtrain Analytics help ODC to align talent development with sales pipeline and forecast.

BI Insight: How different is the outsourcing market now compared to when you started in 1996?

Maruthu: Earlier, companies were looking for offshore service provider to manage non-core operations at low cost. Now it’s much more than moving some functions to lower-cost locations. It’s about rethinking how a company has to organize itself to support the business. I think the current trend is to retain functions that require substantial costs to implement, like R&D and manufacturing and move functions that will realize positive return on investments more quickly such as IT and ITES services.

Systech Corner , ,

Green BI

April 30th, 2009
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Background

Adopting green practices will help reduce the environmental impact. Hence, there may be some micro and macro changes and innovations to be undertaken in the consumption and operational pattern for practicing the green BI initiative in an organization. Implementing some green practices comes at significantly high cost but it offers greater return on investment.

Green BI practices helps to accomplish both green and financial objectives. An organization implementing a number of environment friendly best practices cuts on the energy consumption and carbon emissions. With the rising procurement costs, organizations need to diligently plan the utilization of resources albeit social imperatives, that implicitly contributes to the green practices. Corporate social responsibility and need for creating a sustainable environment require better manageability of data warehouse systems and resources aligning to the business requirements. Understanding the business process enables the organization to focus on business optimization.

BI organizations being entirely dependant on data, green initiatives largely depend on consolidating and virtualizing data centers. Optimization of energy is of paramount importance which predominantly contributes to the carbon footprint which could be practiced through e-commuting, using virtual resources, prohibiting unnecessary printing, proper disposal of e-waste and switching to greener products.

IT organizations carbon emission is 2% of the world’s environmental impact says Gartner’s report. Tough BI offers great benefits to the companies to better control and optimize their business, yet the evolving BI market contributes a larger part to the carbon emissions. Under utilization of disparate assets and energy hogs need to be immediately addressed especially with Governments bringing in regulations and placing restrictions on energy consumption by organizations and the carbon emissions. While it is essential for BI organizations to better handle servers and storage space, it is also required to efficiently design the BI applications as well. Adopting the various energy conservation practices offers greater benefits than just going green.

Hardware Optimization

As we start discussing about green initiatives, the energy monsters of the BI organizations could be hardly missed and it starts from right here.

The rapid growth of BI industry and its implementation across various sectors results in huge amount of data to be managed. Catering to the processing and storage requirements, the burgeoning data centers increases the need for facility space. Data centers consume almost 40% of the energy consumed by the organization. And almost 60% of that power is used to cool the DCs that turn our attention towards it. The operating cost of data center increases, as the power consumption increases with the energy costs rising as well.

Initiatives to make DCs zero carbon facilities include switching to high density blade servers built with specialized processors that consume less electricity and requires less cooling than traditional server; consolidation and efficient cooling mechanisms with better air flow designs.

Though green practices for data centers largely focus on converting them energy efficient with an aim to increase maximum utilization of hardware infrastructure, BI concentrates on consolidation emphasizing the de-duplication of data.

Ubiquitous proliferation of data is huge especially while maintaining disparate servers for development, test and production environments in BI. Server consolidation optimizes the usage of under utilized servers by amalgamating the different environments and running it on a consolidated server, avoiding de-duplication of data.

Are the organizations using the DCs to its maximum storage efficiency just having single instance of data without being replicated? Installing separate data marts for each and every department of an organization leads to data duplication. Building enterprise DWs assists database consolidation approach to attain de-duplication of data that invariably reduces the storage space.

Virtualization and cloud computing plays a vital role in better utilization of the consolidated hardware.

Virtualization provides an instance of a PC on an existing hardware platform. This allows running several virtual machines with multiple OS’s on a single physical system. Virtualization improves the utilization capacity of the server running multiple applications simultaneously.

While BI requires running loads and processing data from centralized servers, thin client could be effectively put in place replacing desktops and PCs avoiding unnecessary hardware. With thin clients the processing is entirely performed on the server side that will be beneficial for organizations offering better manageability of resources. Thin client reduces the power consumption requiring only 30-50 watt when compared to the typical desktop which requires 150-180 watt saving substantially on power consumption.

Cloud computing provides access to the IT services across the internet from a centralized server. SaaS, the concepts of cloud computing, with web enabled services, allows clients to view the dashboards or reports online via the network. The end user could use the web interface, without having to be bothered about the underlying technology and the requirement to maintain the infrastructure. BI SaaS also known as ‘on-demand BI’ is an emerging market that makes BI accessible to organizations at large and offers the advantages of shorter implementation cycles.

Energy Conservation

In BI organizations scheduling loads during off business hours and then processing the data, keeps the servers and pc’s running 24×7. But, truly these servers and other devices lay idle for almost 50% which could be turned off when not in use. Else by using high efficient processors, idle cores could be shunt into sleep mode, instantly turning them on as they’re needed. Though greener products come with such options, existing infrastructure could be powered down using software agents for certain period of time depending on their usage.

Another practice where energy could be conserved is using TFT monitors instead of CRT because LCD monitors with LED requires less power. Turning off the monitor while not in uses zero energy and turning PCs to hibernation or sleep mode setting can drop energy consumption over 90 and 100 percent respectively.

Managing Application

BI applications should be designed specific to the user requirements. Careful designing of reports with flexible options to retrieve only the required information would reduce the processing of unwanted data that the user will not always require.

Design reports compatible with mobile device to send notifications or alerts, when some events occur, instead of the user constantly monitoring the reports and be dependant on the IT infrastructure.

Reports with web enabled services provide the flexibility of accessing it across the network which avoids the necessity of printing. Environment conscientiousness should be propagated to use e-documents and not to print reports unless and otherwise required. Inkjet printers with vegetable inks are eco-friendly compared to laser printers. Recycled papers could be used for printing to support the green initiatives.

E-Commuting

E-commuting offers benefits to both organizations and employees. Adopting such practices could significantly reduce fuel consumption, the emissions and traffic. Flexible work patterns reduce the air travel that stands huge in contributing to the carbon footprint. Enabling the remote users to securely access the network regardless of the location avoids the unnecessary employee commute. Newer technology practices like video conference, go to meetings, audio conference over VoIP have changed the pattern of communication which proves effective for BI organizations with project teams and clients across the globe.

Consumables

Increasing awareness of the environmental impact and depleting natural reserves have made product vendors to manufacture mercury, lead, cadmium and chromium free greener and recyclable products. Faster computing needs have to be satisfied by DW servers without hindering the performance while hitting million of records to process the data. Right from chips to servers and databases to printers, energy efficiency and performance optimization are taking precedence that offers compact and higher capacity products. High speed processing units greatly enhances the speed of query processing and loading. Green manufacturing would also greatly help in reducing e-waste.

Sustainability

Electronic products as it becomes obsolete, the e-waste has to be prudently discarded by the organizations. Dumping away items in landfill contaminates the environment. From the total e-waste generated only about 40% are channeled for recycling. Hence e-waste has to be channelized through exchange or take-back facility programs offered by vendors or recycled through registered recyclers.

Manage-Measure-Enhance

To measure the results is vital in order to manage the change. Monitor and measure the carbon footprint, material scrap, water and energy usage, etc., to find out and reduce the consumption. Power tracking products are available that enable accurate measurement over time. Online calculators can be utilized to find out the carbon footprint.

We know that BI offers comprehensive and better understanding of the business performance collecting data from all the sources and offering a consolidated and interpreted view. BI can not only provide insight to better manage the business but also helps in tracking the details about the environmental impact that the organizations are causing. BI solutions also supports to monitor and measure the carbon footprint, material scrap, water usage, etc., to analyze the organization’s carbon footprint helping to formulate greener policies and implement it successfully.

Organizational benefits of going green

Green BI from the business perspective offers monetary savings by adapting the green practices. Efficiently designing BI solutions, better utilization of available physical resources and usage of greener products, reduce the energy usage and the floor space that drops the expenditure and realize cost savings.

Summary

Putting green initiatives into practice have progressed from just board discussions to actual implementation. Though some initiatives may require substantial investment, on longer term, the returns will be beneficial. To make your infrastructure and applications greener,

  • Reduce the energy usage by eliminating the unwanted hardware and make processes more efficient;
  • Reuse the available resources; and
  • Recycle the e-waste responsibly.

Monitoring the effectiveness of the implementation leads to efficient management of all the resources. And, BI organizations adopting various energy conservation practices are hugely beneficial more than just going green; a profitable solution.

Systech Corner ,

Where is BI heading in 2009?

January 29th, 2009
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“When our economy is in a recession and most companies are looking to contain costs and run businesses effectively BI would definitely provides competitive edge. At the same time companies are desperate to cut back their investments in IT. This has created an interesting dynamic as to whether Bi will grow or shrink in this environment.”

No Nostradamus could give a pristine answer to a question like this one. But, at the wake of deepening recession, the time has arrived for Business Intelligence to share its services, to bring together all the resources, eliminate waste and increase the flow of information.

If you had been inspecting BI under a microscope in the recent past you would have noticed that the BI sector has been bustling with activity. On one side you see the substantial BI pure-play vendors like Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos being taken over by larger, non-BI vendors indicating that BI has become a strategic application and complementary to ERP implementations. On the other side you notice emerging trends in BI, like the development of new DW appliances, upcoming real time BI, Operational BI, MDM etc.

We at BI Insight thought it would be interesting to see what our own people at Systech thought about the future of BI in 2009 and their perspective of BI’s survival in times of economic doom-gloom. People that we spoke to were cautiously optimistic about BI and its potential in helping business under current market conditions. Only time can tell, how much of this optimism is proven right in 2009.

Aditya Gollapudi, Sr. Technical Lead.

Analytics is here to stay in business. Better reporting and analysis are indispensable in today’s business for finding hidden profits and increasing revenue. However, at times like this, businesses try to cut costs and do their analysis manually. A manual approach eventually leads to failure, as it is more expensive and cumbersome. This could be one of the fatal mistakes that businesses could make. The maturity of the BI industry is put to test now, as companies decide what to keep and what to discard so that they remain competitive. The fact that companies are running BI with improvements in speed and efficiency in real time is a testament to BI’s capability. So to answer your question, assuming that companies are wise – BI is here to stay and grow.

Anbu Swaminathan, Engagement Lead.

I see BI moving towards real-time data warehousing. Most businesses depend on analytics reporting at corporate level to make business decisions. Real time BI will co-exist with traditional data warehousing model in Financial Sector and Banking. In banking, transactions happen 24/7, and there is a constant challenge on how to report these live transactions. Traditional data warehousing would not satisfy these challenges.

Ashish Parikh, Chief Financial Officer.

I see BI go upwards and onwards. Industry specific BI solutions will emerge. New laws and new technology will arise. The US has to revamp Health Care and Financial Services industries, as stated by our President. And I believe BI would play a major role in this process. I also see lots of changes in BI technology as demanded by business. We need the best information to understand “what-if” scenarios for the events that have not occurred in the last 70 years. We should be capable of giving answers fast. Time has arrived for US to embrace Open Source Technology as it would make technology affordable and reachable to small and mid-cap companies.

Ramki Ranganathan, Sr. Architect.

Since its beginning, the role of BI was to provide information to the management so that they can get a clear insight into their business. I don’t think there is going to be any change in the core purpose of BI. But the way we implement BI might change in 2009. For example, before we had DW appliances like Netezza, executives were ready to wait for a couple of weeks or even more for an analyst to provide them with useful information from the huge amounts of data. All that is changing now. Real-time operational reporting has changed the face of BI. We have hardware appliances and new software technologies that help the BI team to provide meaningful information to the management at a faster pace. So the speed at which we provide information might change in 2009.

Systech for example has been there in the BI field for past 16 years. If we compare data warehousing 16 years back and right now, there isn’t a tremendous difference in its basics. Having said that, today every organization knows what BI is and what its role is in the business. How it’s going to improve the economy really depends on what kind of information the executives are looking for. If you know what you want, you can get it from BI. On the other hand, if you don’t know what you want no matter how fast your implementation is or how advanced your technology is, it is not going to matter. I believe the way business uses BI might change however, the fundamentals of BI will remain the same.

Shabnam, Sales Executive.

With today’s economic recession, a lot of companies look at cutting costs to save on multiple fronts. All the businesses are postponing spending money in Supply Chain, inventories, in IT etc. But on the other hand, in order to stay competitive and profitable you need BI to give you insight into your business and competitive edge. So in that way you need to invest in BI more than ever to know where your profit centers are. Solutions like Profit/SKU from Pi Solutions or say Smart I, that gives you an entire BI appliance running natively on an IBM machine help you save money and increase profits. Those are such viable options now because you get to invest in BI without spending huge amounts of money. The companies that support their business initiatives with appropriate BI solutions will definitely come out ahead in this economy.

Suresh Kumar, Manager, Finance.

BI is one of the key factors in finding profits for any industry. Today companies have realized the importance of analytics in the measurement and improvement of their performance. BI has made it easier to analyze figures at the core of the business and take guesswork out of decision making. At bad economic times like these, it could help turn companies around and help an industry grow positively. I see BI heading towards greater acceptance. If I owed a business I would count on BI to find me profits.

Systech Corner ,