IT solutions provider Logicalis is blazing a trail in the growing market for Business Intelligence (BI) and Information Management (IM) solutions.
Demand for BI is growing in Logicalis' core market of medium-sized enterprises. The company is also approaching verticals such as retail and education. "Many organisations find themselves lumbered with disparate systems acquired across multiple and often competing ROI cases," said James Thompson, Director of Business Analytics and Information Management, Logicalis. "This often results in an increase in data complexity alongside a decrease in data quality and consistency. We are seeking to minimise the technical and governance overhead placed on customers, focusing our services on being easy for them to implement, operate and change in line with their business goals."
Logicalis' BI proposition provides customers in the UK and overseas with a service to access data from any of their systems, convert it into actionable information and insight, and deliver it to them securely and consistently, regardless of location. "Our strategic growth aims are to provide more cloud and managed service options for customers to reduce the overheads associated with administering BI and IM," said Thompson. "This will free customers to focus more on maximising business outcomes as a result of greater insight on their operations, products, consumers and competitor performance."
Thompson's key watchwords, 'rubbish in, rubbish out', define his approach. "If the data initially entered is inaccurate then all the big data analysis in the world will not give you a clearer and smarter picture of your business," he said. "Many also find that 'fashionable' visualisation tools barely fix departmental business problems and fail to move the business closer to its customers, or improve profitability. With this in mind, we are seeking to engage with companies to apply technology that will enable them to get to high quality 'right information' as opposed to low quality big data."
According to Logicalis' Retail IT Survey 2014, although half of decision makers within retail organisations are seeing positive results from their use of business analytics, just three per cent are using the insight of predictive analytics for anticipating future trends that could influence business performance. "Our aim is to ensure customers realise the true value of their IT investment, helping them sweat their BA and IM assets as a sound basis for investing wisely," added Thompson. "This also applies to the cultural and governance programmes that ensure their technology initiatives deliver real value."
Logicalis has embarked on a new BI project for retail consortium Nisa Retail. The cloud-based solution replaces Nisa's existing on-premise offering enabling its business users to gain deeper insights to better inform key business decisions. David Morris, Head of IT at Nisa Retail, explained: "Our incumbent BI solution gave us a glimpse of what was possible with BI and analytics, but we knew we could do more to leverage the technology. We wanted to adopt a new approach that would pool all data sources from right across the business to put the right information in the right users' hands, and quickly."
Logicalis is deploying the latest version of IBM Cognos, hosted on its cloud platform and wrapped with professional services inclusive of training for Nisa's team. Through the proof of concept and early implementation, the process by which data is processed and then presented to the business teams has already been transformed, according to Morris.
"Whereas before it was taking the team days to build data cubes, it's now taking them just a matter of hours with far greater consistency," Morris commented. "And as we look to mesh together data from warehousing and logistics to what customers are buying, where and when, the information garnered will be invaluable. The data will help us to shape and refine our proposition in terms of negotiating better costs with our suppliers, for example, which will directly benefit our retailers' bottom line, enabling them to operate more competitively on the high street."
Nisa's business users have also felt the early benefits. With the cloud-based solution providing greater performance, business users from across the trading, finance and customer insight teams have been able to drill down into the analytics instantly with no delay or latency on the system, providing a far great user experience. "The solution has re-invigorated the use of Business Intelligence in the organisation," added Morris. "Our previous solution was seen as something that simply existed to help Nisa's business users get from A to B in their roles. Now, as they dive deeper than ever before into our data, the solution is regarded as a key tool for delivering tangible business benefits and informing key decisions, focusing the IT department on areas that really help drive the business forward."
Chris Gabriel (pictured above), CTO for Logicalis UK, added: "Business Intelligence is all about the opportunity to engage and act upon the right information, at the right time. Critical data is being captured by organisations like Nisa everyday that, when put to work, can inform better customer engagement, marketing and growth strategies.
"IT departments in retail are coming under increasing pressure to align more closely with business strategy, and now is the time to re-shape the IT function to focus on high value strategic initiatives. With this initiative, Nisa's IT team is seizing the opportunity to do just that, enabling its users to exploit IT to make a genuine mark on business performance to the benefit of its members."