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Showing posts with label Business Intelligence And Analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business Intelligence And Analytics. Show all posts

Monday 18 February 2013

Hold Hexaware Tech; target of Rs 94: Firstcall Research


Firstcall Research has recommended hold rating on Hexaware Technologies with a target of Rs 94, in its February 11, 2013 research report.

Firstcall Research has recommended hold rating on Hexaware Technologies  with a target of Rs 94, in its February 11, 2013 research report.

“The Hexaware Technologies is formed in 1990. Hexaware is a specialized IT and BPO service provider, ranked the fastest growing mid-sized company in India. The company leadership positions in PeopleSoft, HRIT, Airlines, and BFSI. It specialize in Business Intelligence and Analytics, Legacy Modernization and Independent Testing, and have around 6000 staff in 20 countries serving 156 clients globally. The experience in the business process outsourcing arena fully complements and strengthens its service spectrum and allows operating as an enterprise-class solution delivery company.”

“The solutions that aim to provide high value by optimizing cost of ownership of technology investments for customers. Hexaware has been mentioned as one of the fastest growing RIMS providers in the Gartner report titled “Competitive Landscape in India-Based Remote Infrastructure Management Service Providers” Hexaware is a leading global provider of IT and BPO services, focusing on delivering real business results from technology solutions and specializing in Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, Enterprise Applications, HR-IT and Legacy Modernization. With 156 active clients, Hexaware has achieved leadership position in industries such as Healthcare & Life sciences, Manufacturing, Travel, Transportation, Hospitality and Logistics, Banking, Finance, Insurance, Leasing and in Domains such as HR and Business Analytics. The companies leverage over 4,000 person years of project experience and 500 engagements globally, including successful implementation of technologies like PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle Applications, CRM and Microsoft Dynamics to affect an increased ROI from clients’ ERP investments.”

Monday 16 February 2009

Industry Specific BI – What's the common denominator?

My previous post on business process fundamentals concluded with a friendly exhortation to BI practitioners inciting them to view their craft from the point of optimizing business process.
So the next time you are involved in any BI endeavor, please ask this question to yourself and the people involved in the project – “So which business process is this BI project supposed to optimize, why and how?” I define ‘Optimization’ loosely as anything that leads to bottom-line or top-line benefits.
Business processes by its very definition belong to the industry domain. Companies have their own business processes – some of them are standard across firms in that particular domain and many of them are unique to specific companies. Efficiency of business processes is a source of competitive advantage and the fact that ERP vendors like SAP has special configurations for every industry illustrates this point. So by corollary, for BI to be effective in optimizing business processes, it has to be tied to specific industry needs creating what can be called as “Verticalized Business Intelligence”. (V-BI in short)
At Hexaware’s Business Intelligence & Analytics practice (the company and team that I belong to), we have taken the concept of V-BI pretty seriously and have built solutions aimed at industry verticals. You can view our vertical specific BI offering at this link and we definitely welcome your comments on that.
Though Verticalized BI is a powerful idea, companies typically need an “analytics anchor point” to establish a BI infrastructure before embarking on their domain specific BI initiatives. The analytics anchor point, mentioned above, should have the following characteristics:
  • All organizations across domains should have the necessity to implement it
  • Business process associated with these analytics needs to be fairly standardized and should be handled by experts
  • Should involve some of the most critical stakeholders within the organization as the success of this first initiative will lay the foundation for future work
Based on my experience in providing consulting services for organizations in laying down an Enterprise BI roadmap, I feel that “Financial Analytics” has all the right characteristics to become the analytics anchor point for companies. Financial Analytics, the common denominator, typically comprises of:
  • General Ledger Analysis – (also known as Financial Statements Analysis)
  • Profitability Analysis (Customer / Product Profitability etc.)
  • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting
  • Monitoring & Controlling – The Dashboards & Scorecards
  • General Ledger Consolidation
The above mentioned areas are also classified as Enterprise Performance Management. The convergence of Performance Management and BI is another interesting topic (recent announcements of Microsoft have made this subject doubly interesting!) and I will write about it in my future posts.
In my humble opinion, the prescription for Enterprise BI is:
  • Select one or more areas of Financial Analytics (as mentioned above) as your first target for Enterprise BI.
  • During the process of completing step 1, establish the technology and process infrastructure for BI in the organization
  • Add your industry specific BI initiatives (Verticalized Business Intelligence) as you move up the curve
I, for one, truly believe in the power of Verticalized BI to develop solutions that provide the best fit between business and technology. That business and IT people can sit across the table and look at each other with mutual respect is another important non-trivial benefit.
Thanks for reading. Do you have any other analytics anchor points for organizations to jumpstart their BI initiatives? Please do share your thoughts.
Read More About  Industry Specific BI

Friday 2 January 2009

What is “Safe to Bet On” in Business Intelligence?

While the phrase “Safe to Bet On” is an oxymoron of sorts, it is that time of the year where we first look at the past, derive some insights and look forward to what the future has in store for us. I have no doubts that 2009 will be doubly interesting for BI practitioners as compared to 2008.
Having said that, I decided to do a bit of introspection to figure out what skills (can also be read as competencies) should I be looking at to stay relevant in the Business Intelligence world far into the future, say at 2020. Hopefully that resonates with some of you.
Let me first try and get down to defining the skills required for Business Intelligence and Analytics. The trick here is to stay “high-level” as any BI person will acknowledge the fact that one we get down to look at the trees (rather than the forest), the sheer number of skills required for enterprise level BI can get daunting
Taking inspiration from the fact that any business can be condensed into 2 basic functions, viz. Making & Selling, I propose that there are 3 key skills that make for successful BI
Skill 1 – Business Process Understanding: If you are a core industry expert and can still talk about multi-dimensional expressions, that’s great! But most BI practitioners have their formative years rooted on the technology side and have implemented solutions across industries. The ability to understand the value-chain of any industry, map out business processes, identify optimization areas, translating IT benefits to business benefits are the key sub-skills in this area.
Skill 2 – Architecting BI Solutions: This skill is all about answering the question of “What is the blue-print” for building the Business Intelligence Landscape in the organization. Traditionally, we have built data warehouses & data marts either top-down or bottom-up, integrated data from multiple sources into physical repositories, modeled them dimensionally, provided ad-hoc query capability and we are done! – NOT ANYMORE. With ever increasing data volumes, real-time requirements imposed by Operational BI, increased sophistication for end-user analytics, the clamor for leveraging unstructured data on one hand and the advent of On-Demand Analytics, Data Mashups, Data Warehouse appliances, etc., there is no single best way to build a BI infrastructure. So the answer to “What is the blue-print?” is “It depends”. It depends on many factors (some of which are known today and many which aren’t) and the person / organization who appreciates these factors and finds the best fit to a particular situation is bound to succeed.
Skill 3 – BI Tools Expertise: Once a blue-print is defined and optimization areas identified, we need the tools that can turn those ideas into reality. BI practitioners have many tools at their disposal straddling the entire spectrum with excel spreadsheets at one end to high-end data mining tools at the other extreme. If you bring in the ETL & data modeling tools, the number of industry-strength tools gets into the 50s and beyond. With convergence of web technologies, XML, etc. into mainstream BI, it probably makes sense to simplify and say “Anything you imagine can be done with appropriate BI tools”. “Appropriate” is the key word here and it takes good amount of experience (and some luck) to get it right.
In essence, my prescription for BI practitioners to stay relevant in 2020 is to be aware of developments on these 3 major areas, develop specific techniques / sub-skills for each one of them and more importantly respect & collaborate with the BI practitioner in the next cubicle (which translates to anywhere across the globe in this flat world) for he/she would bring in complementary strengths.
Read More About  Safe to Bet On