Blog: Krish Krishnan

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May 13, 2008

HP to Buy EDS!

Wow, the acquisition spree is well on into Q2 of 2008. HP has just announced that it will be buying EDS for $12.6 billion. Leaving the cash aside, it creates a strong professional consulting services arm for HP, which probably had been lately looking to find such an acquisition.

What does this mean to the industry
1. The concept of "big 4" in the consulting industry is still on for sure.
2. The smaller fish in the pond now can be the big fish, if they can compete on all grounds equally
3. SAP, Microsoft and Oracle will now probably look for more acquisitions.

As we move along to the next quarter, we will need to wait and watch what will happen. It is an interesting time for the industry and BI is still going like the "energizer bunny", which is good for everybody.

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May 7, 2008

Why do BI projects suffer?

In any given organization, there are a few BI projects that are marked as "suffering." I have been asked many a times as to why some projects in the BI psace are very successful and others suffer? The answer is very simple in my opinion. If your BI project is owned and driven by the business, the project has a potential to be very successful, on the other hand if your IT owns and drives the BI projects, chances of business aligning to use the end solution and adopt to it are not very high. Is organizational alignment the only answer?.

Not at all. The key to getting a successful BI implementation lies with both Business and IT teams. But the underlying goal is to identify the business pain of the organization as related to BI and then implementing a solution to address that pain. But it does not stop there, you need a strong business sponsor and a strong technical sponsor to go toe to toe on solving the problem. I'm seeing certain large corporations fail because of issues from Business or IT communities within the organizations. My thought for these companies is to get your internal act together with a steering committee, sort out the issues and establish the goals of how your BI projects will succeed. Without a shared vision and a joint ownership of the solution architecture, the BI project will definitely suffer before it becomes successful.

While organizational alignment and project governance are enablers to these goals, the people from the different parts of the organization coming together is the fundamental key to ensure success. I wish all the projects in the BI space to be a success and raise a toast in this anticipation.

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May 1, 2008

Why - Unstructured Data Integration

Over the past years we have all been using the structured data content in the data warehouse to perform BI activities. But is that all the intelligence about a business there is? No, there is a lot more to the intelligence factor in the form of unstructured data.

Unstructured data is embedded in documents, reports, emails and notes. It is knowledge capital that is very useful when integrated for use in the data warehouse. Why do we need to wake up to this requirement? Consider an example scenario: there are hundreds of applications processed everyday in credit cards and consumer credit, insurance, etc. Not all of the decision-making notes are captured to the application. If this data was available for data mining and analysis purposes, we could build smarter decision-making engines since more pattern data is available. This is just a scratch of the surface, and there are more useful things that can be accomplished with unstructured data in the data warehouse.

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