IT WEEK • 21 JUNE 2004
40 COMMENT Barclays may have lost faith in CRM,
but for many firms the technology is indispensable
40 INTERVIEW How BI tools
are gaining mass appeal
MANAGEMENTWEEK
WHERE TECHNOLOGY BECOMES BUSINESS REALITY
Editor: Madeline Bennett
India acts to protect data
Miya Knights
OFFSHORE PROTECTION
•
India’s IT trade body Nasscom
ndia’s IT software and services trade
plans to introduce standardised
body Nasscom has announced plans
data protection measures at outto improve local data protection rules
sourcing service providers.
to reassure companies that if they outIt aims to reassure customers in
source to India their data will be kept priEurope and the US that data sent
offshore to Indian outsourcers will
vate and secure.
be adequately protected.
The National Association of Software
and Service Companies (Nasscom) said it
would create a certification authority to plug
absolutely crucial. Offshoring tends to
gaps in Indian data security law. The organraise the spectre of threats in the cusisation added that it wanted to be proactive
tomer’s mind,” Codling said. “Nasscom is
and to discuss the issues with European and
absolutely right to shut the stable door
US bodies, so that data protection concerns
before the horse has bolted.”
will not be a barrier to offshoring.
However, Codling added that he had
The move is designed to precome across no evidence to sugempt the creation of new legislagest security is weaker in India
tion in countries such as the US
than elsewhere.
and the UK – major users of offClive Davies, partner at media
shore services in India – to further
and technology law company
control and protect data.
Olswang, said the proposed rules
Phil Codling, senior outsourcwould help to reassure customers.
ing analyst at research firm Ovum,
“Data can be moved around so
said firms must consider the securapidly nowadays, it can often be
rity implications of offshoring
moved around just because of
data. “Anything that involves off- Codling: data
surplus capacity,” he added. “It’s
site data means data integrity is integrity is key
just as easy to move data from
I
•
Course aims to hone IT
chiefs’ leadership skills
Madeline Bennett
he National Computing Centre last
week announced details of a programme to train IT chiefs in business skills
to help them become more involved in strategy-making and board decisions.
The IT Executive Programme, unveiled
by the NCC in partnership with business
school Ashridge, is designed for IT professionals who want to develop leadership
and other business skills. It could also
prove useful for managers in other departments who have responsibility for technology investments, according to the NCC.
The course will link the content of
Ashridge’s MBA programme with the
NCC’s Certus programme for IT leadership. The Certus scheme consists of mod-
T
itweek.co.uk
ules for topics such as change delivery,
team building and project management.
“It will offer people on the Certus programme more general business training,”
said Michael Gough, the NCC’s chief executive. He added that the programme could
prove attractive for organisations wanting
to make structural changes, as it could help
them to create a new cadre of IT professionals to support the transition.
The IT Executive Programme is due to
launch in 2005, and will be available at
Ashridge’s facility near London.
A recent study by recruitment specialist Harvey Nash revealed that many IT professionals find it difficult to become involved in board-level decisions. It found
only 15 percent of chief information officers have a place on the board, a drop of
London to Mumbai as it to from London
to Manchester. What matters it what happens when it gets there.”
Davies said security measures could be
grouped into two categories – physical and
regulatory – but the two are often mixed
up. He added that firms buying offshore
services should ensure contracts stipulate
their own security policies will be followed
by their offshore partners. And they might
want the agreement to stipulate where
their data will physically be held.
A firm cannot make a third-party supplier assume all liability for breaches of
data security and protection laws – but it is
possible to write into an agreement that
the supplier must abide by policies that
echo regulations, said Davies.
“You can use the agreement that you
strike between the parties to actually reflect
the way in which you want the security to
be dealt with,” he added.“However, you do
have to go [to the offshore site] to check
and see how it’s going to be operated.”
Ovum’s Codling said the pressure on
firms to get more value from their IT
spending is fuelling growth in offshoring.
www.nasscom.org
IT LOSES BOARDROOM CLOUT
Percentage of IT chiefs with seat on board
20%
19%
2001
2002
15%
2003
15%
Source: Harvey Nash
2004
five percent compared with previous years.
Though almost four out of five CIOs felt
they should report directly to their organisation’s chief executive, only just under
half of respondents actually did so.
Gough said that IT managers need to
demonstrate leadership skills if they are to
increase their standing within their organisations. “Chief executives want IT managers to show leadership quality and help
deliver business value, instead of just being
accountable for their budget spend.”
www.ncc.co.uk www.ashridge.org.uk
CONTENTS
40 COMMENT Barclays is questioning
the wisdom of its CRM investment, but now is not the time to
lose faith in the value of technology, writes Mark Street
37 INTERVIEW Information Builders
managing director Jim Irving
explains how firms can use business intelligence systems to draw
in customers via the web
BI app offers
data access
in real-time
Madeline Bennett
Enterprise reporting specialist Actuate will this month update its reporting platform to give users access to
corporate data in real time.
Actuate 8 will include Enterprise
Information Integration technology
from Actuate’s acquisition of data
integration firm Nimble Technology.
This means data can be integrated
into the application from disparate
data sources, perhaps including CRM
applications and legacy systems, and
end-users can access information in
real time, said the firm.
The product will include a unified
metadata layer to improve the accuracy of information, and a servermanaged spreadsheet system to
ensure firms maintain a single version
of corporate data while allowing business users to work on their own
Excel spreadsheets.
Actuate has also added monitoring capabilities to track usage of the
system and identify the most and
least used reports and analyses.This
data could be used by customers to
tailor the system to better meet
employees’ needs, said the firm.
Actuate’s Mike Thoma said that
the system acts as a conduit connecting information users to a single version of data from disparate sources.
“With Actuate 8 in place, information
architects get centralised control
over data so it’s auditable,” he said.
“Web, analysis and spreadsheet tools
all talk to the same metadata layer.
Other BI solutions have multiple layers.” Thoma added that the ability to
access data in real time is important
for many business users.
Actuate 8 will be available from
30 June, priced from $500 (£270)
per named user.
Web gives BI to the masses, p40
www.actuate.com
39
MANAGEMENTWEEK
IT WEEK • 21 JUNE 2004
This time it’s personal
Does the recent decision by Barclays to cut IT jobs and hire more staff for its branches
indicate problems with customer relationship management systems, asks Mark Street
inancial services firms are
likely to pore over Barclays
recent decision to employ more
counter staff to improve customer
service. The bank plans to recruit
1,000 extra branch staff, but cut
middle management roles in IT
and other departments.
The implication is that for all
the talk of reducing costs by offering customers self-service banking
– through links to customer relationship management (CRM),
telephone and internet services –
an interaction with a human being
could lead to better business.
Experts attribute falling customer satisfaction to poorly configured CRM systems that are
focused more on the products that
companies are trying to sell than
on the customers themselves.
However, it is important that
firms guard against a possible backlash. The fact is that while some
consumers may prefer to have a
chat to a friendly cashier in the local
F
branch while making a deposit,
there are many more professionals
who simply do not have the time.
For them, the digital relationship
with their bank is paramount.
It is also worth considering that
this could be just another example
of a leading player attempting to
differentiate its brand in a crowded
and samey market. After all, when
the bulk of banks decided to cut
costs through closing a number of
their branches, a steadfast few
made a virtue of the fact that they
continued to keep theirs open.
As we brace ourselves for
another round of IT bashing, it is
important to consider the effect
that such reports can have on the
morale of the IT department.
Now is the time for IT directors
to step up their own self-promotion drives, and gather as much
information about customer interactions as they can.
If a CRM strategy is failing, IT
teams should look for evidence to
prove it is not the fault of the technology itself, but rather the parameters under which it operates.
If consumers are abandoning
their tasks before completion, perhaps it is because they object to the
number of hoops they are made to
jump through, rather than the
communication channel itself.
Possibly, the marketing department should share the blame and
reduce the number of in-house
advertisements for products that
consumers do not really want.
If there are failures, then it
could be time to increase investment in CRM rather than cut it
back. Perhaps the growing use of
predictive analytics could help, or
even investment in a thoughtful
redesign of the user interface.
It is also important that companies do not lose sight of the return
on investment that they got from
the CRM technology in the first
place. Many of these systems are
about to pay off, and now is not
Web gives BI to the masses
Information Builders’ Jim Irving explains how firms can use
business intelligence systems to draw in customers via the web
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE INTERVIEW BY TOBY WOLPE
IT Week: As managing director of Information Builders, how do you think business
intelligence [BI] systems are perceived?
Jim Irving: A lot of people still think BI’s
only something really clever business analysts do on their desktops. But it has moved
on from there. And that’s why BI is a title
that we’re not that happy with, because our
biggest customers are delivering value information to vast numbers of people.
Is it the web that has made this possible?
The web is a really good delivery mechanism internally. It has
moved business intelligence gradually down
the pyramid in the
organisation and that
is probably where most
Irving: plan
for cost of
licensing
40
business intelligence vendors say the marketplace is. But where we are seeing our
growth is among end-user organisations
that have suddenly cottoned on to the fact
that the web works for everybody – by the
way, this applies to the public sector as well.
Some of our customers are touching on a
million users of business intelligence.
How can business intelligence add value?
Without any publicity, the New York City
Department of Health gets four million
hits a year because it has put its health
inspection restaurant reports up online as
an added-value service [see the web address below]. You go in and you get a graphic of New York and the boroughs. You type
in the restaurant name and it tells you
online and in real time that it had 42 violations. Are you going to eat there? Now by
word of mouth in New York people look
up restaurants before they go out. They’ve
actually changed the culture.
What about value to the business?
For about a decade the average compliance
[with health laws] in New York had been
about 20 percent. What happened to compliance when people stopped coming in
through the door of your restaurant because your last report was bad? By the end
of the first year it went to something like 70
percent. So, that also had a specific value
for hospitals, for example, with fewer people with food poisoning, and for New York
businesses with people taking less time off
work. You can take any commercial company and say,“What would your customers
like to know if it was so easy to get that
they didn’t have to do any work?”
That’s an example of business intelligence
working well, but what things go wrong?
People buy business intelligence on the
front-end – the graphs and all the rest of it.
And time after time we get people saying,
“Yes, we bought a licence for 1,000 users
but when we got to 150 it couldn’t scale up
any more and that was on four servers and
now we’re having to get eight servers.” You
want something that will seamlessly build
and will operate across different platforms
as well. When you start to say, “Right we’re
the time to be cutting them.
IT departments should also
prepare for a lowering of staff
morale, particularly as there is a
lack of job growth in the industry
at the moment. A recent survey by
analyst firm Meta Group indicated
that IT directors will have problems due to staff cutbacks, less
money for projects, and a reluctance to recognise the fact that star
workers are likely to walk away in
search of better deals.
Now is not the time to lose faith
in the value of technology. We have
come too far to question the economic viability and the user benefits of IT systems. It is simply a
question of fine tuning. ITW
[email protected]
ABOUT JIM IRVING
Irving is the managing director
• Jim
of business intelligence vendor
•
•
Information Builders UK.
Irving has worked for the organisation since 2001.
He has over 25 years’ experience
within the IT industry, having previously been employed by Silicon
Graphics, Sequent,Amdahl,Wang
and British Olivetti.
going to do it for the whole organisation,”
then it becomes probably the biggest issue.
What other things should IT teams think
about when implementing BI systems?
Software consolidation is also very important. A common trend is people saying
they’ve done a bit of analysis and they’ve
got anything from three to 12 business
intelligence and reporting environments.
There is this whole concept of getting down
from a sort of out-of-control departmental
approach to actually physically trying to
have a standard for the organisation. If you
have too many systems, you’ve not only got
the physical costs but you’ve got that fact
that when you do want to get to some form
of organisational analysis, these systems
can’t talk to each other very easily. ITW
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