January 17, 2009
Quite often it is necessary for an organization to revise and re-examine it’s decisions, goals, targets etc., in order to improve the performance in many ways and this activity of re-engineering is called as Business Process Re-engineering which is also known as Business Process Re-design or Business Process Improvement.
Analyzing present business process diagrams, process flow diagrams(work flow diagrams) and data flow diagrams may lead to success in business process re-engineering since these diagrams are very powerful in visualizing the activities, processes and data flow of an organization.
Business Process Re-engineering Examples
The entire organization’s business processes or an individual department’s business processes can be re-engineered according to the needs of an organization.
For example, a bank may have many activities associated with it like investing, credit cards, loans, etc., and they may be involved in cross selling(e.g. insurance) with other preferred vendors in the market. If the credit card department is not functioning in an efficient manner as the way the bank expected, it might re-engineer the “credit card” business process.
In this situation, bank may think about decreasing the interest rate, offering promotion, redemption, balance transfers etc., to the customers in order to facilitate the performance. This would lead to re-engineer or re-design the current bank’s credit card process. The net effect is the improvement in performance of credit card division and conversely, if anything goes wrong, major losses are also expected.
Computer system’s infrastructure, competition, financial strength, expenses reduction, customer satisfaction, product quality, better management, employees involvement are some of the areas that an organization is interested to do business process re-engineering and change the existing processes.
Project Infrastructure
An organization may migrate from X database to Y database for better performance, storage capabilities and reliability.
Competition
An organization may buy a new and sophisticated application in order to overcome the competitive pressure.
Financial strength
Many small and big companies need money to expand their business and in this situation, they may get loans, or issue shares etc.
Product Quality
A calling card distributor may buy good calling cards from the vendors that are good in quality, time and easy connection.
Posted in Business 
2 Comments »
Tags: Business Intelligence, Data Modeling, Data Warehouse
January 15, 2009
Business Process Management, a set of activities, is essential for a new or existing business in a way that it helps an organization to optimize current business processes and future organizational and operational changes.
Business process management is done with the help of different tools that help in capturing, modeling, designing, integrating, deploying, testing, measuring and maintaining several business activities. The success or failure of each company depends on how good or bad it is able to manage the entire life cycle of its processes.
Need for Business Process Management:
- To plan for a new business or for a new change in the business.
- To avoid the common mistakes that happens in a project.
- To document business processes in a common language to help IT and non-IT team members.
- To draw business modeling and data modeling diagrams and to capture business rules in a way we want them.
- To implement enterprise architecture or enterprise integration architecture (EAI) or ETL architecture.
- To measure data by using business intelligence tools.
- To enhance business to business transactions.
Advantages of Business Process Management (BPM):
BPM Models:
- BPM’s activities like Modeling, Automating, Monitoring, Analyzing, and improving the business processes helps an organization to get good profits in less time.
- BPM’s business process models visualize the activities within the organization and business-to-business transactions.
- BPM’s process flow models visualize the process flows within the organization and business-to-business transactions and the relationships between process flow.
- BPM’s data flow models visualize the data flow within the organization and business-to-business transactions.
- BPM’s decomposition diagrams for business process modeling, process flow diagrams and data flow diagrams visualize the processes and activities in a detailed manner.
Workflow:
- BPM’s workflow helps to define, create, execute, automate and manage processes within the organization and business-to-business-transactions to get more productivity.
Documentation:
- The entire business process procedures can be documented in a shared multi user repository. This provides technical and non-technical persons to understand the different processes that occur in each departments of the organization, its performance and the outcome of each business processes.
Quality:
- BPM increases quality and quantity of a product or a service provided by the organization.
Reports:
- BPM reports can be very useful to the topmost executives of an organization and whoever needs it.
Resources:
- BPM reduces the working hours of the employees.
Exceptions:
- BPM reduces the errors and exceptions when compared to a manual process.
Regulations:
- BPM helps an organization to abide by the regulations of the government.
Business-to-Business Transactions (B2B):
- BPM is the core of B2B transactions to gain leverage with vendors, customers, consumers, and suppliers.
Competition:
- Provides significant competitive advantage over competitors.
Simulation:
- Simulation techniques with different scenarios can be used on business processes to explore the effect of change.
Posted in Business, Technology 1 Comment »
January 12, 2009
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 is the next version of the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. Building on the features and capabilities of the current Windows Server 2008 release version, Windows Server 2008 R2 allows you to create solutions that are easier to plan, deploy, and manage than previous versions of Windows Server.
The Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta is available for free download via Microsoft Download Center,
Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Product Keys for Evaluation
Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Enterprise: TFGPQ-J9267-T3R9G-99P7B-HXG47
Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Standard: 2T88R-MBH2C-M7V97-9HVDW-VXTGF
Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Datacenter: GQJJW-4RPC9-VGW22-6VTKV-7MCC6
Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (Itanium Systems): CQ936-9K2T8-6GPRX-3JR9T-JF4CJ
Windows Web Server 2008 R2 Beta: GT8BY-FRKHB-7PB8W-GQ7YF-3DXJ6
Microsoft Download Center Download Links
Other Information
This software is for evaluation and testing purposes. Evaluating any version of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta software does not require product activation or entering a product key. Any edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta may be installed without activation and evaluated for an initial 30 days. If you need more time to evaluate Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta, the initial 30 day evaluation can be extended to August 1st (at which time the OS will become inoperable) by entering the product key below for your selected edition.
Posted in Microsoft 19 Comments »
Tags: Windows
January 12, 2009
Introduction
These days there are so many companies trying to build data warehouses and there are a lot of companies selling Business intelligence products. The new version of SQL Server 2005 has the Business Intelligence Development Studio and this is one of its main upgrade from SQL Server 2000. It enhanced the DTS environment and changed its name to Integration Services (SSIS), which is similar to an ETL tool. It integrated with .NET so it can easily build reports or online applications. Microsoft is definitely putting its energy in the data warehouse business.
Also SQL Server is gaining on the market share of other RDBMSs and most experts said it was because of the BI integration. However, does your company need a data warehouse? And how do you choose the right BI product for your company?
First it must be the business direction that produces the driving force to build the data warehouse and not the IT department. The company must identify the goals and objectives of ‘why install a data warehouse’.
For example, my old company was a bank; it decided to build a data warehouse so it could keep track of a loan from the application process until repayment. One objective was the business wanted to find out how long it took the loan from application status to approval status, and if the loan got denied, they wanted to find out what the reason was. However when the company decided to build the data warehouse, the IT department helped the organization to understand the scope of the project. The business has to identify what the enterprise needs. It has to decide how much they want to spend on the project, what kind of data they want to capture, etc. This helps to determine what kind of hardware, operating system, communication links, RDBMS and application program IT needs. The business also has to understand that it is a continuous project, both business and IT has to decide who is responsible to fix problem, who is responsible for new requests and who is responsible for tuning. It needs continuous support from the business.
The IT department has to know what they need in order to build a successful data warehouse. First they need to understand the business data. It needs an implementation plan, a realistic timeline, a team of people with knowledge to build the data warehouse – a data architect, a data modeler, business analyst, data quality administrator, meta data administrator, security administrator and good database developers. The scope of the project has to be reasonable; sometimes the business tends to ask too much at once, the IT manager has to understand one thing – never takes on too much too fast. It tends to fail.
Data Quality
Data is an important asset to the business; it helps the business to make daily decision and direction of the organization. Data quality is the most important element of the data warehouse. Data quality and integrity can directly affect many decisions. The data warehouse is not just capturing data. It can also minimize data redundancy, increase customer satisfaction, improve data quality, and provide good customer reports. So the business needs to set up a metrics to measure if the data warehouse is successful. The response time, the quality of the data, the satisfaction of the customers are some of the measurements the business needs to look at. If the data is incorrect and no one trusts the data warehouse, it becomes a whole bunch of tables sitting in a database.
In a lot of companies, the data can come from ERP systems, legacy systems, outside sources and even may be Excel sheets on someone’s PC. The data warehouse team has to take responsibility to validate the data, to work with the business to set up business rules and to work with data owner to set up security for the data. This is part of the ETL process.
For example, the ERP system had a customer name ‘John Doe’; the legacy system had a customer name ‘Johnny Doe’. Are they the same person? Did they have the same address? It they did, that meant they were the same person. This is part of the cleansing process. It is important because the customer count will be off if the data is not validated. It may mess up the reports for marketing, sales and the finance departments.
The database has to be well designed to eliminate redundant data. The data has to be standardized and consistent. It also needs to have business rules to process certain data. For example if the customer has an invalid zip code, should it be put in the data warehouse or should it be put in an error report until the data gets corrected. Meta data is one way to standardize the data; it also documents the source of the data, where the data stores in the database, the definition of the data and the business rule of the data. In this way, the IT department can easily identify if the data is in the wrong database or comes from the wrong source; it can also explain the definition of data to the customer.
Business Intelligence Products
So now the company decides to build the data warehouse, how do you find the right tool? First the company has to evaluate what RDBMS to use for the data warehouse. You have to know how much data does the company have, how often does the company need to load into the data warehouse and how fast it needs to load the data. There are SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, DB2, and others. The hardware, the communication links and the support is also an important factor to consider choosing the right database. After serious consideration, my company decided to use SQL Server 2000 for our data warehouse because of the size of our data warehouse and the cost. We also look ahead the new features of SQL Server 2005 and its integration with .NET for future development.
Then we have to choose the ETL tool. There are a lot of ETL tools in the market, for example Ab Initio, Informatica Power Center, IBM WebSphere as well as good old DTS packages in SQL Server. One of the data warehouse experts had said that the important part of ETL is that the people must understand the data. The best tool is the tool that you can retrieve and load the data efficiently and correctly and is the most cost effective for the company. Do not just look at all the fancy and expensive tools, evaluate every aspect. Is the tool easy to set up? Is the tool easy to learn to use? If it takes a developer six months to learn to use the tool, is it worth the time and effort?
I used Ab Initio to move the same amount of data from Oracle 9i to SQL Server 2000 and at the same time I used DTS package to do the same thing. The response time was almost the same. But Ab Initio costs a lot of money and DTS package is free. I am not saying Ab Initio is not a good product, if the company has to retrieve zillions of data everyday, it is definitely a good product to consider. Just liked I go from place A to place B (approximately 10 miles) and I go there driving a Honda Civic. It is cheap and reliable. At the same time I can also go there driving a Hummer. Do I prefer a Honda Civic than a Hummer? Of course I would like to drive a Hummer if I am as rich as Bill Gates, but my bank account tells me a Honda Civic is good enough! But if I have to drive up to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota in December, I may consider another vehicle. In my case we use good old DTS packages and stored procedures to extract, cleanse and load our data warehouse and it is doing a very fine job.
A business intelligence tool is used to help the customers to access and analyze the data in the data warehouse. After you build the data warehouse, then you have to choose BI tool. It must be the one provide the most benefits to the business and match the business expectations. The tool has to provide security and privacy of the data. The users can access it and learn to use it fast. If it does, then it is a good business intelligence tool. As I said before SQL server 2005 has Business Intelligence Development Studio to do the job. There is also a lot of other companies selling BI products; for example Cognos, Hyperion, and MicroStrategy. The business and IT have to evaluate which product works the best for the customers. Right now we use Cognos for reporting, but with the rising cost of Cognos and with the new features in SQL Server 2005, who knows, anything can change in the future.
Well, does your company need BI and DW? You have to ask your CIO and CTO, and it is up to you to explain to them the importance of a data warehouse to your company, also you have explain all the pros and cons of choosing the right product.
Ref: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Design/doyouneedadatawarehouse/2460/
Posted in Business, Microsoft, Technology No Comments »
Tags: Analysis Service, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, ETL, Integration Services, Reporting Services
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