Business Intelligence and Information Management Specialists
Intelligent Business #10
A Question Of Ethics
Explore the Business Intelligence ethical minefield that exists when data from a variety of sources is combined, stored and used by organisations. Conrad Bates talks to www.VoiceAndData.com.au in article, "Just Another Face In A Crowd".
C3 Integrity mentioned in Data Integration Magic Quadrant
We're pretty chuffed that C3 Integrity was given a mention by a leading analyst firm in the recently released Magic Quadrant for Data Integration tools. Considering we're the only Australian company on Gartner's list, we believe this is a great achievement and one worth talking about! See the whole article here. Gartner described C3 Integrity in this article as follows "C3 Business Solutions, Sydney, Australia, www.c3integrity.com - Offers...tools for consolidating data, validating data, and acquiring data from sources including Excel, Access, CSV, and fixed-width and XML-standard data formats."
Research says maturity doubles BI value; we say it's exponential...
Based on the recently released 2011 TDWI BI Benchmark Report*, it is clear that although BI can deliver short-term ROI (within 12 months), most organisations find that maturity is what delivers true value from their programs. The research showed that those who claim their BI environment as advanced get twice the value from it than those in the early stages of their program.
We believe it's more than that. From our experience, as your BI environment matures, so too, do the uses you find for the information. It moves away from ad-hoc reporting and dashboards and into the realm of forecasting and analytics; which is where true value is realised. Your team develops its skills, they think of news ways to source and apply BI and your organisation benefits.
The insurance industry is a great example. Imagine support centre costs being down 20%, direct mail costs being down 40% and doubling your customer response rate in the process? These results were achieved in just one organisation using smart, mature BI. Read more about this and other case studies in our Insurance White Paper.
The TDWI report also highlights that Business Intelligence is still very much a discipline in development with a substantial one-fifth of organisations listing their programs as in the early or beginning phase. Imagine all that untapped BI potential? With capital spending increasing year on year and investment in operational BI also up, the trend towards BI as an integral business tool is clear.
We often say that BI is like providing our clients with a view of the future. We really can't predict what it will show, but we can guarantee it will be insight that you're not getting currently.
* 2011 TDWI Benchmark Report: Organizational and Performance Metrics for Business Intelligence Teams
TDWI Training in Australia for 2012
TDWI, the premier provider of vendor neutral BI and DW education, is bringing a range of courses to Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra in 2012. We're just ifnalising the schedule but plans at the moment include: BI Project Management, Data Modelling and BI Concepts and Principles to name just a few. These instructors are considered the best of the best in the world. Definitely worth a look.
View 2012 courses.
Join new LinkedIn Group, Information Management Australia and stay up to date on education and training for Information Management, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing professionals in Australia.
C3 still fast in 2012
We'd like to take a moment to brag a little and let you know that C3 was recently named a BRW Fast 100 company for 2011. This tops our position as a BRW Fast Starter last year. Commenting on the win, Cameron Wall, managing partner at C3 Business Solutions, said: "We are no longer a Fast Starter and the rapid growth and achievements of C3 Business Solutions is testament to our long-term commitment to R&D and the excellent team of dedicated and experienced people with which we work." We were also named among prestigious company on the Deloitte TechFast 50 list this year; a little pat on the back for us!
Intelligent Business #9
You may have seen the front page of the Australian IT section on Tuesday (14/12/10) which identified the biggest challenges and priorities for CIOs next year and showed that Business Intelligence was rated #1 by 40% of the CIOs surveyed. It’s going to be a busy 2011 and supports our decision to bring international BI educators to Australia early in the year to help deal with the potential skills shortage identified in this article…
C3 brings Leading U.S. BI Educators to Australia
We are very excited to announce a new educational initiative for 2011. C3 and The Data Warehousing Institute tm (TDWI), the premier educational institute for business intelligence and data warehousing globally, are partnering to bring top TDWI U.S. instructors to Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney in January and early February 2011. The first course will look at Agile methodology applied to Data Warehousing, delivered by published international expert, Ralph Hughes.
Over the two day course, Ralph Hughes will provide a step-by-step guide to dramatically increasing the speed of your development cycle and will show you how to become a world-class rapid data warehousing development team. Read more at TDWI Agile Data Warehousing: Novice to Mastery
Download the Course brochure: Agile Data Warehousing (Early bird special ends 31 December 2010)
The team at C3 would like to thank you for your support this year and we wish you and your family a safe and Merry Christmas...and a Happy New Year that is full of accurate, timely, profitable decisions based on real information!
All the best
The team at C3
Intelligent Business #8
This issue, we present you with some research from the Centre for Decision Support at Monash University which can help you during development and implementation of your BI program.
Social media delivers more effective BI
In a paper presented at the International Conference on Decision Support held in Lisbon earlier this year, Dr Rob Meredith and Mr Peter O'Donnell, both respected Australian lecturers/researchers, argue that Web 2.0 and social media, beyond their value as sales & marketing tools, can be used to successfully enhance BI applications. The paper provides a simple framework outlining the value of Web 2.0 platforms and the functionality of social media in fostering collaboration and contribution from users. Dr Meredith and Mr O’Donnell go on to show how social media platforms can be used to create more effective and ‘active’ BI applications. Useful if you’re trying to engage with your users.
BI success linked to in-depth understanding of decision making behaviour
BI is the top technology priority for CIOs in Australia and remains a major growth area for business IT according to David Arnott, respected lecturer at Monash University. Arnott claims that BI systems have the greatest impact on organisational strategy, but that BI projects suffer from very high failure rates or utilisation problems. The issue he believes, is that BI research and practice treat managers as a homogenous group. Management research on the other hand, highlights the differences between both levels of management and individual managers themselves. The result? A significantly more complex development environment than that assumed by current BI research. Arnott claims that there are no specialist methods for analysing the decision support requirements of senior executives. This paper discusses the rationale and design of a research project that uses a ‘design-science strategy’ to test a research method based on a sound understanding of senior executive information behaviours. Very interesting reading.
Request either paper from the news section of the C3 website.
Intelligent Business #7
C3 Sponsors 9th Annual CIO Summit in Brisbane
This month C3 Business Solutions sponsored the invitation-only, Marcus Evans 9th Annual CIO Summit on the Gold Coast. Over 300 delegates attended the event taking place over 3 days.
In a C3 case study, former Comcare CIO, David Paull (now Director Information Strategies, Department of Health and Ageing) presented on the holistic approach to information management at Comcare and the importance of a well-crafted Business Intelligence strategy.
To see David’s presentation, you can download it here.
Intelligent Business #6
Engaging technology to improve everyday services
An article in today’s Australian Financial Review, by Paul Smith, quotes RailCorp Deputy Chief Operating Officer, Tony Eid about the NSW rail network’s recent six-year investment to improve running times.
C3’s role in the second phase of this investment program is to collate and analyse incident data, with a view to ultimately improve train running timetables. In the Financial Review article, Eid said a ‘benefit of the new system will be the removal of manual tasks for its specialists, once data is automated.’
Data drives policy decision making
C3’s Conrad Bates and Cameron Wall discussed C3 Integrity in an interview in this month’s issue of CRN Magazine. The pair explained that the public sector is showing an interest in Integrity because of their need to overcome the challenge of ‘how they [the public sector] can distribute data collection mechanisms to collect data from sources external to their environments so they can make policy decisions on it.’
C3 wins state award
On another matter the esteemed Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) has recognised C3 Business Solutions as a key player in the Business Intelligence industry, making it the state winner of the 2010 iAwards in the Research and Development category for its unique data management product, C3 Integrity. Each state winner in all categories now enters the national round, with winners in each category announced in August
Intelligent Business #5
C3 Business Solutions was interviewed recently by BRW and editorial appears in the current issue, May 20-26.
Cameron and Conrad were interviewed by Jeane-Vida Douglas, who was recently named Business Technology Journalist of the year.
The editorial provides some background on the growth of C3 and some insight into the industry. The full article is availble in the news section of the C3 website.
C3 Business Solutions was also recently ranked 25 by BRW in the BRW 2010 Fast Starters.
Intelligent Business #4
C3 Business Solutions sponsored and made a presentation at the invitation-only, Marcus Evans 10th Annual CFO Summit on the Gold Coast last week.
New South Wales Director of Finance for the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water, Neil Hayman presented the department’s successful BI strategy, developed by C3 Business Solutions.
Mr Hayman told an audience of fellow CFOs and top financial executives from across all industry sectors that the method developed by C3 Business Solutions, 'connects everything an organisation does with the goals of the organisation'. At the final steering group, Mr Hayman added that the Director General had gone from 'sceptical to enthusiastic.' (Read the full release on the news section of www.c3businesssolutions.com).
Mr Hayman outlined how the department is embracing Business Intelligence, following strategy development in late 2009, as well as the department's move towards the use of C3 Integrity (www.c3integrity.com), enabling the rapid delivery of tangible outcomes within a long term strategic vision.
Other summit speakers included the former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard; UBS Chief Economist, Scott Haslem; Ericsson Australia CFO, David Spong, Group CFO, AXA Asia Pacific Holdings, Geoff Roberts and Bluescope Steel CFO, Charlie Elias.
Intelligent Business #3
Time travel into the future may not be as fantastic as you think.
Boston-based, Nucleus Research recently published its annual list of top ten predictions for 2010 which reported that companies will use business intelligence tools to ‘make future predictions.’ The report went on to confirm that the user population for analytics is expanding to include a range of internal and external ‘non-technical’ users such as marketing specialists, risk managers, call centre staff and consumers. No longer is data solely the domain of organisational ‘techos’.
Supporting this argument further, Gartner says that BI usage will spread by some 25% within organisations, increasing to a 50% user rate by 2012. Gartner also predicts that ‘35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.’
And that’s where competitive advantage will truly be felt. Those who can access accurate, timely information and then use it to make good business decisions for the future will reap the rewards. Not only that, but delivering such information to their customers will enhance reputations and build loyalty.
Business intelligence that allows internal users and external customers and stakeholders to access data that has been interpreted and ‘drilled down’ will be critical as user-sophistication and demand for information increases.
Competitive advantage can be further enhanced by incorporating externally available, non-traditional information – such as that supplied by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The added value of overlaying external information onto internal company data is enormous and provides an immediate ‘want to use’ mentality, delivering people new information, previously inaccessible.
Whether the data at our fingertips is developed from internal or external sources, or both, products that can deliver such a solution will become invaluable over the coming years.
While physical time travel is likely to remain in the realm of fantasy, the ability to make more accurate forecasts than before, using reliable information from the present, is as immediate as it is far reaching.
Visit or contact C3 Business Solutions for more information.
Intelligent Business #2
2009. What a Year.
According to Gartner, “the economic downturn [has forced] businesses to … re-think their strategies and operating plans and face demands from stakeholders…for greater transparency...”
Add to this the unknown impact of the current United Nations Climate Change convention in Copenhagen and you have good cause to reach for the Christmas spirit – for all the wrong reasons!
On reflection, the need for greater transparency is timely, with the economic downturn a critical wake-up call for businesses still under-resourcing their BI capabilities. More than ever, we need savvy BI to harness intelligent market analysis and offer a watchful eye on ever-changing compliance matters.
Our current circumstances are made more tenuous by the debate around Copenhagen and the proposed Australian Emission Trading Scheme (ETS.)
Tony Abbott has said that if an ETS is reached with the US, the Liberal Party will vote bipartisan to pass climate change legislation in some form. The need, then for Australian businesses to accurately register and report their greenhouse gas emissions if they produce energy or consume energy, at or above specified annual thresholds is undoubtedly imminent, even if the ‘how-tos’ and the ‘wherefores’ are still being bedded down.
Few would argue against the need for a dramatic increase in BI capability and transparency in 2010 to ensure appropriate public disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions through consistent and comparable data. Australian businesses can also expect to face consequences if they fail to provide this data.
If ever there was a time to make a New Year’s resolution to sharpen your BI competencies, it’s now.
We hope you have a safe and happy break and look forward to a successful 2010.
Intelligent Business #1
The Australian Financial Review quoted C3 Business Solutions earlier this week in a Page 1 story on the potential fines faced by Australian CEOs if reporting requirements aren’t met in the new Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme. C3 is quoted on the compliance obligations and opportunities for improving your decision-making landscape (you can review the article on C3 Business Solutions News).
The above is a good example of what will appear in C3’s new Intelligent Business report. Designed to help organisations use their own business intelligence to achieve better business outcomes, the report will be issued regularly and will feature articles from a range of industry experts on topical issues which impact Australian business. You are currently on our Intelligent Business distribution list and we guarantee that content will be short, sharp, interesting and useful.
You can expect the first issue in the near future. Please click unsubscribe at the base of this email if you do not wish to receive the report.