How to align your IT strategy and business strategy more closely
Our latest case study outlines the review process and methodology we undertook to align a client's IT Strategy more closely with their business strategy.
It’s time to bring in the little Elephant (Hadoop) into your Data Eco systems – Part 2
In an earlier blog I outlined several reasons for adopting Hadoop into the Data eco-system. In this post I'll try to demonstrate an approach for bringing Hadoop into the data environment, and outline 8 elements to consider before embarking on this journey.
Top tips for ECM as a service
As many of you may be aware, the New Zealand Government has embarked upon a programme to deliver Enterprise Content Management as a service. ECM as a service is also growing in popularity across the private sector, as companies seek to increase efficiencies and focus on core business.
It’s time to bring in the little Elephant (Hadoop) into your Data Eco systems
Over the years business intelligence has grown in leaps and bounds. The early-2000s were when we built data warehouses in a structured and rigid approach with well-defined data modelling and source-to-target mappings. We invested heavily in the infrastructure to hold those massive data warehouses. That’s the era when the database appliances started to dominate in the data warehousing arena. A fortune was spent on setting up data centres, database appliances and other hardware. The majority of those spends were on the infrastructure and the heavy lifting of data from various source systems. Those were the days for professionals who were good at taming database appliances, UNIX systems, and networking. Consulting organisations were much keener on hunting those species. At one point we often wondered whether data warehousing was going to be a monopoly and was meant for only the big boys like Oracle, Teradata, IBM, SAP etc. Data warehouses in those days were meant for big established companies and were really costly, plus the majority of companies were sceptical about the ROI. Those were the days of analytical and MIS reporting.
Turning data into business advantage
Download the Executive Briefing paper Turning Data into Business Advantage
Architecture modelling and the Field of Dreams
I used to be a swimming coach, and didn’t always win any friends among my coaching colleagues by telling my swimmers to “challenge everything”. Swimming training tends to rely heavily on the extensive use of ‘drills’ – exercises designed to focus on a particular component of a stroke, but frequently neither the coach or athlete bothers to understand the purpose and desired outcome – they do it because they always have; I used to encourage swimmers to only do a drill if they knew exactly what the aim was. Can you see where this is going?
Knowledge Management = Enterprise Search…or does it?
How many times have we heard this, that to 'do' Knowledge Management well all you need is an enterprise search tool? That this view is still held by some is not surprising since the first foray of many organisations into the Knowledge Management sphere was through search tools, with Yahoo probably being the biggest.
Show me the Money: Business Casing for Business Intelligence
The 7th Annual Business Intelligence Summit is being held in Auckland on the 24th and 25th of February. The summit is targeted at understanding how to deliver maximum value from Business Intelligence and Analytics.
Air Sandwich Anyone? Closing the gaps between strategy and delivery.
In my few years back working in NZ, I've encountered a common theme that repeatedly surfaces, across most sectors and industries. It’s something that I think plays on the minds of all CEOs, Strategy Leads and CIOs. I'm referring to the giant chasm that divides strategy and delivery - or as we call it here at Optimation, the air sandwich. Put in other words, our country’s businesses seem to be guilty of devising business vision, goals and strategies, then haphazardly launching straight into projects that don't deliver what was expected, or worse, fail to deliver at all.
Getting value from business analytics
Business analytics is rapidly becoming a key focus for us at Optimation, with a growing number of customers asking us about how they can best use and manage rich and varied data sources to make better business decisions. With that in mind, we were delighted to sponsor the recent meeting of the NZ Analytics Forum, which was held at Victoria University's Business School in Wellington.
