Could you outline the BI landscape in Asia today?
Rebecca Norton (RN):In the many developing economies in Asia, information and knowledge have become the key drivers for growth. We are currently living the “knowledge age” where profits and success are based on the ownership of information and the ability to use it to improve and innovate.
As knowledge and how it is deployed has become a key business differentiator, the Asian C-suite is rethinking BI as an essential technology investment. They are using BI to understand, process, and communicate information, turning it into an asset for insight and decision making.
While the majority of BI deployments in Asia are still at the basic level, they are expected to become more sophisticated in the next 3-5 years as the understanding of BI becomes more advanced.
Organisations have come to realise how beneficial it is to deploy business intelligence, given its capability to give companies better insight into how they are performing against their business plan. However 64% of Asian CFOs are still doing their planning and budgeting on spreadsheets. What do you think is holding back Asian companies from adopting BI?
RN: I believe it is a lack of awareness of its capabilities and misconception of its costs that is hindering BI’s adoption in Asia.
As the region consists of many developing nations, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) make up a large portion of the market. However, many SMBs are facing the conundrum of needing to balance aggressive growth plans and IT investments with the constraints of smaller IT budgets, limited space and less support staff.
Business Objects recognizes the need to tailor BI solutions to help alleviate key SMB challenges. Since 2005, we have been delivering BI solutions that are innovative, well-packaged and well-priced and customized for SMBs’ needs.
The price point has been the main deciding factor for many SMBs. Many customers we speak to feel that the playing field has leveled thanks to the ability of having BI at their fingertips.
What is Business Objects doing to change the perception of BI in Asia?
RN: Our mission is to transform the way the world thinks and works by connecting people, information and businesses. I believe that being a leader in this field and demonstrating the customer benefits of BI will help change and improve the perception of the technology in the region.
Are you witnessing any differences in approach to implementing business intelligence in the different markets within the Asia Pacific region?
RN: Deployments of BI largely depend on specific business and technology requirements across both industry sectors and geography.
We are seeing many smaller companies in developing countries more likely to add functionality to existing environments, rather then building up a BI deployment from scratch.
In the more developed nations, we are seeing a trend of companies shifting from their data-centric approach to a new and process-embedded paradigm that fosters informed, collaboration across and beyond corporate boundaries, empowering the business user within the context of daily business activities.
Regardless of the size of the company, all customers are looking for business-relevant BI solutions that ensure long-term and sustainable business value.
How would you describe the next generation of Business Intelligence?
RN: The next generation of BI software will combine data integration and data quality together in one product.
We at Business Objects are already delivering such technology to our customers through BusinessObjects™ Data Services which helps customers establish the strong foundation and agility they need to help meet enterprise information management demands.
What are the challenges- both the technology and business aspect- organisations might face when integrating a BI tool?
RN: We are continuously working on making our tools easier for non-BI experts to use. The challenge for us is to develop more and more applications that have analytics under the covers so the end user doesn't know there are in fact some algorithms going on behind the scenes.
Some companies are limiting the use of BI tools to some power users. They see the challenge with extending BI capabilities to the masses less due to the complexity of the tools but more due to a lack of user understanding of how to make the most of them.
Another business challenge might occur mainly for midsized companies as they are often used to making decisions based on a combination of experience and gut feel rather than pure facts and numbers. Trusting and relying on a BI tool comes close to a cultural revolution to some of them.
This also means that a transition from the former approach to using BI technology enterprise-wide requires time and employee training. Training employees in how to make use of BI tools is crucial for a successful enterprise-wide BI implementation.
How would you advice them to navigate through the integration obstacles?
RN: Multiple data sources (ERP, CRM, SCM) can make the transformation of enterprise data into accurate, comprehensible and actionable information one of the company’s biggest IT challenges.
In addition, to providing training proper for BI users, we are working on making our tools more intuitive and preconfigured, so we can also limit the damage an unskilled user.
Customers can expect more in the way of business user-friendly BI tools in the months ahead.
According to a recent Gartner report, Business Objects is leading the pack in worldwide BI platform revenue in 2007. How do you intend to maintain this strong foothold you have, could you share some of your strategies?
RN: Business Objects is not just leading in the worldwide BI platform revenue in 2007 by Gartner but was also ranked as the number one vendor for business intelligence (BI) tools with a 14.2 percent market share, and combined with SAP the company leads the market with a 19.2 percent share by IDC.
Our number-one rankings are great validation of our ability to execute on new products and technologies that optimize business performance.
We will continue to break the barriers of traditional BI to enable every person connected within an organization to have trusted, immediate access to the business information they need to do their jobs – just as easily as they have access to e-mail and the Internet.
We are constantly raising the bar by looking for ways to improve by encouraging new thinking, ideas and ways of doing business, and customers and partners are a key source of our innovation. In addition, our employees have a passion for our mission and continuously focus on aligning execution with strategy.
Together with SAP, we help organizations overcome what we see is the number one pain point experienced by nearly every business today: the disconnect between the world of making decisions and the world of executing them.
SAP is a leader in the enterprise applications market, helping organizations automate and improve business processes, leading to better business execution. And Business Objects is a pioneer and the clear leader in the business intelligence market, helping organizations make more intelligent decisions, leading to better business strategy.
Execution without strategy is wasteful. Strategy without execution is useless.
Together, SAP and Business Objects help organizations fix this gap between strategy and execution, enabling customers to optimize their business performance.
With Green IT being a hot topic these days, some of your competitors are working towards exploiting this space with SAS recently unveiling a tool that allows corporations to analyze the impact their operations have on the environment. Is Business Objects planning to “go green” with their offerings as well?
RN: Business Objects is already “Green” with regards to our personal company practices and through the solutions we provide. Within Business Objects itself, our grass-roots employee Green Teams drive environmental initiatives worldwide. Country teams get together once every quarter to decide on one environmentally friendly idea they can carry out.
For example, our three Singapore offices are active in reducing, reusing and recycling initiatives. Employees cut down on paper consumption by printing on both sides of a sheet of paper, switch lights off if the office is naturally lit, and have initiated many activities to raise awareness around green issues.
In Vancouver Canada, the team there voted to do away with plastic water bottles. As a result, all bottled water was removed from vending machines and more water fountains were installed.
From our customers’ perspectives, our BI solutions are helping them reduce their carbon footprint by decreasing the amount of paper used for generating reports.
Could you share your experiences with being a CFO in Asia, how do you deal with the different cultures and business practices?
RN: The first step is to understand that Asia is a very diverse region both geographically and culturally which brings with it challenges. However, overcoming these challenges also makes the results even more satisfying. It is very important to acknowledge and appreciate the differences and understand how to deal with them on a daily basis. I have found highly valuable seminars where the focus is on helping people understand the different cultures of the colleagues they work with closely.
These learning opportunities enhance my appreciation and acceptance of the differences, which are essential to making the working environment more effective. It is also critical to remember that by having diverse people working together, you often come up with better results due to the different perspectives. |
