Why OEM Reporting Services
Many of our clients develop software. They’ve become successful in much the same way that many independent software vendors find success: they do one thing very well. That might be CRM, or financial managment, or billing, expense management, or a myriad other things. I used to work for a bioinformatics company that wrote some very successful algorithms. But the story is always the same – no matter how good you are at collecting, storing, and analysing information, you have to report it back to the user at some point.
Now you have to be an expert at user interface as well!
You can code some reports, in a form that you think will be useful for your users. You can even run focus groups and beta releases. But no matter how well you do it, there’s always going to be a user who comes back and asks for the information to be presented differently. Customizing reports for users is like learning the bagpipes: you spend a lot of time and effort, piss people off along the way and it’ll never make you famous.
Who’s got focus?
Our clients have decided to focus on their core strength and leave the reporting to reporting software (like SAP BusinessObjects). By integrating Business Intelligence and reporting software into their own software, they’ve given users the ability to customize their own reports. It also gives them:
- Security of information
- Reporting in the cloud
- Faster report development time
- Dashboard capabilities integrated into their software offering
- Performance – a responsive user interface
Reporting Software OEM Case Study
Check out our latest customer success story: Monexa. Their success with OEM reporting development has immediately removed reporting as hurdle to overcome during the sales process. They’ve realized a 75% cost reduction on client reporting needs.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
Once I read that the US Department of Health and Human Services had posted a list of confidentiality breaches, I was curious to see the extent of the problem. I had recently read the results of an AAPS survey, which suggested that a clear majority of physicians distrust Electronic Health/Medical Records (EMR/EHR) for privacy reasons. I wanted to understand if their concerns were justified, or not.
Most physicians are concerned that third parties will be able to access EMR. Rightly, they are concerned that doctor-patient confidentiality should be preserved, and without physical possession of a file, they lack control. Some clinicians store information on their personal computers, but are concerned about losing control of the data once it goes into a central repository. Are they right to be concerned?
The extent and nature of medical records breaches
The HHS website web-page only lists incidents where 500+ individuals have been affected by a breach. There have been nearly 40 of these between 09/2009 and 01/2010. That’s a lot! I can only imagine that there are hundreds or thousands of smaller breaches. It’s impossible to say what’s been done with the data. So privacy concerns are justified.
How were medical records breached?
Since this website was mandated by the HITECH act, I fell into the trap of assuming that all the breaches were from central EMR systems. They’re not:
- Theft/loss of paper records: 8 cases
- Theft/loss of personal computer: 20 cases
- Theft associated with EMR (hack, theft of backup-tapes/hard-drives): 5 cases
- Miss-directed email: 2 cases
It does make sense that since laptops and PDA have intrinsic value, they are more likely to be stolen than paper. So clinicians shouldn’t store any medical records on them. If clinicians do have computer files on patients, they should keep the data in the data center, under lock and key.
It’s hard to draw conclusions from such a small sample, and it will be interesting to see if a trend develops. Are people more likely/capable of stealing paper records than EMR?
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
On February 4th, 2010, I attended a round-table discussion for people who are leading the charge for BI at their organizations. I was glad to sit as an observer, and learn of the challenges, successes and lessons learned by this diverse and experienced group.
The discussion was free flowing, so I’ll wait until next week to assemble my notes. For now I’ll share a couple of my favourite quotes:
“Executive buy in is needed to change a Crisis Centre to a BI Competency Centre” -Richard L.
“When talking about KPI, what you measure needs to align to [your] strategy. The ‘K’ stands for ‘Key’ not ‘Thousand’.” -Fraser U.
“Data Governance is 99% cultural change, and 1% technology” -Bob B.
“Data is the stuff that flows through an organization; information is the stuff that drives decision making” Richard L.
I found these statements to be pithy and insightful. Apologies if I misrepresented your words a little in my rushed note-taking. I hope for more to come at the next round-table discussion.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
In case you missed it, Gartner has released a new ‘Magic Quadrant’ analysis on the vendors in the Business Intelligence market.
I’ve seen a lot of these things, and I always recommend taking them with a pinch of salt. It’s important to note that this is not a rating of products but of companies. That’s fair. Working with a good vendor – i.e. a well managed company – always improves the customer’s experience. My criticism is that the rating extends to marketing, operations and customer base, where these things are remote from the customer experience. Also, it does not involve the customer experience in working with partners, which is a huge influence on customer experience.
Enjoy,
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
Data modelling is one of those areas I haven’t really tried to learn to much about. Or should I say: I’ve tried not to learn too much about. It just sounds complicated. Here’s what I knew before today:
- You have some data. It can be customer contact details, purchasing transactions, patient treatment information, whatever. It’s stored in big databases — very unfriendly.
- If you want to take a look at this data to get some answers, you have to pull it out. Make it easier to work with, summarize things.
- In order to do that, you have to first understand what the data means, how it relates to other pieces of data. So write it down. Create a model:
- First there’s a logical model. You could write this on paper, or a whiteboard. You can get more detailed later using software.
- Then there’s a physical model. This is where you use the concepts you’ve drawn out to create a data store and relationships.
- The fourth thing I knew is that I really don’t need to know the details!
But it’s important for business people, like me, to be involved in modeling the data we work with. The more we understand, the better. Initially I thought there could only be one type of model. There’s data, there’s a model. 1 to 1. No. Wrong. You can model things in lots of different ways, and it depends on:
- How much stuff you want to include in your model (scope)
- How generic you want your model to be (abstraction)
- If you want to model the current state or a proposed state (time)
- How you’re modelling — whiteboard, flowchart, software, physical model
Steve Hoberman wrote a great article that compares data models to camera settings. It’s an illuminating way to explore the subject.
The one point I don’t understand is the Filter/Function aspect … not sure why the Application point of view should be different from the Business point of view, or for that matter how the camera lens filter analogy carries over. Anyone want to explain that to me?
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
One hour ago, I attended a webinar hosted by the B-eye network, on Healthcare Intelligence. The speakers focused on two aspects:
- Operational Healthcare Business Intelligence
- The IDC-10 update
Healthcare Business Intelligence
First I think it’s useful to distinguish between operational reporting and operational business intelligence. The former is short-term, very focused, and relies on only one system. The BI side of things is more analytical, pulls together information across departments/functions. This means BI can give a big picture, with long-term trends, can be more interactive to highlight problems, and explore solutions.
Common goals for implementing operational business intelligence amongst health-care industry businesses are:
- Driving down administrative and medical costs
- Increasing stakeholder satisfaction
- Improving compliance – claims accuracy and turn around, issue resolution
There are also significant cost reduction priorities of new legislation, which come out in BI through:
- transparency – understanding cause and effect allows for intelligence and automated problem resolution
- flexibility – rapid response information infrastructure
- access – consistent, easier access, faster more accurate processing of claims
However, most of these organizations looking to implement BI, do not have metrics and KPI aligned against strategic/operational objectives, don’t have a strategy or road-map for implementing business intelligence, and don’t have a metrics oriented culture.
IDC and BI
There has been a lot of talk about IDC in the U.S. lately. In case you’ve been living under a rock, that’s because the IDC-10 standard is set to replace IDC-9 in Dec 2013. ICD is Internal Classification of Disseases, the international standard mantained by W.H.O. For organizations that wish to be compliant – which should be everybody – this means more diagnostic and procedural codes. It also means a code structure change (increased length), and unfortunately there’s no easy mapping between IDC-9 and IDC-10 codes. (General Equivalence Mappings (GEM) can help but won’t do everything for you).
At the same time, HIPAA 5010 is coming up. This is a major update of electronic transaction formats for healthcare. 5010 is the latest and is required for IDC-10. It affects many information systems, such as EDI claim transations, remittance, eligibility and claim status. It won’t have as big an effect as IDC 10, but it’s recommended to do it at the same time.
How prepared are you?
Canada has already completed the migration to IDC-10. And, not surprisingly, took a long time, from 2001 – 2005. Training and preparedness can reduce the headache. How prepared are you?
- Priorities – risk on long-lead time visible? other priorities impeding?
- Alignment – update part of an overall program, including many systems?
- Ownership – joint ownership between business and IT?
- Funding – is it a corporate strategic initiative?
The Big Upside
All this work on IDC and HIPAA 5010 has to be done. IDC updates will affect data models for data warehouse/marts, ETL, stored procedures and reporting. So considering 50% of healthcare organizations are planning to implement or update a data warehouse, the projects can be rolled in together for significant cost and time savings.
-IainR
The BI Builders
I just came across an excellent article by John D. Halkama (CIO at Harvard Medical School, and other renowned institutions). There is a stimulus program for Electronic Health Records (EHR) and a rulebook for EHR. John tells us what to do with them.
Print 3 tables from those documents, then follow his 25 steps to planning. Full article here.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
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To define Key Performance Indicators (KPI), or metrics for a team, department, or organization, you have to first decide what to measure, then decide how to measure it. Sounds simple, but once you start down the path, you’ll find that the process can quickly become overwhelming. Or worse, a lot of work could be put into the wrong KPI.
Start with the strategic goals of the organization. These will be tied to the organization’s mission statement and short/mid and long term goals. If you are working at the department level, or the team level, the process is the same, as each unit should have it’s own specific goals that tie into the goals of the overall organization. If not, stop working on KPI and start working on business strategy and planning!
The business will identify initiatives that help achieve their mission. The metrics you define should plot performance against these goals.
Example: A product marketing team may have decided to turn their efforts to increasing profitability. They may have set a number of initiatives, including reduced cost of sales. Therefore, one KPI for the product marketing team will be the Length of Sales Cycle. This may be surprising, as it is the Sales team that is usually concerned with Sales Cycle.
The best types of measures are those that reflect true performance and are not lagging metrics – i.e. metrics that simply report what has already happened. Leading measures, as opposed to lagging measures, will indicate a trend of the end performance goal, and thus allow you to change behaviour (or keep on doing what you are doing, if things are good) with enough time to positively affect your lagging measures.
Example: If your overall goal as a mobile phone company is to capture 20% of the current market, you should start looking at your new customer capture metrics and customer drop off, or churn, as lagging measures. Leading measures might be related to customer satisfaction, new product availability, etc. Simple things such as measuring the average time it takes to resolve a customer complaint, or how many invoicing anomalies you have per invoicing run will help to correct churn.
Example2: If you are a marketing team tasked with reducing the length of sales cycle, a leading indicator would be the “average estimated time to close”. A lagging indicator would be the “length of sales cycle for deals that closed today”.
The KPI should not be handed down from above set in stone. The team itself should participate in their selection and definition — after all, they should be held accountable to performance against those KPI.
Once defined, KPI should be consolidated in a central location and this means a business intelligence solution. They should also be presented regularly so that they become part of the culture, and this requires reports and dashboards.
Derek Stobbart
Director of Technical Services – The BI Builders
A recent report by Robert Half suggests that “42% of CIOs are confident their companies will invest in IT projects in the first quarter of 2010.” But it also states that 89% of CIO plan to maintain current personnel levels. Another report by the same firm, back in October, states that IT salary averages are expected to decline by 1.3% in Q1 2010. IT hiring isn’t expected to pick up until late 2010 or 2011.
Let’s add this up:
42% more projects
+ 43% already understaffed
-1.3% pay
—————————————————
= Lots of IT folks doing more work for less money.
Overworking staff for a prolonged period can be detrimental to productivity and morale. But some are looking at this as an opportunity to fill in the short-fall on projects with short-term hires and consultants. Eric D. Brown (The New CIO weekly) writes “I believe that 99.9% of CIO’s in this world cannot adapt to the new IT reality without some assistance from [outside consultants].” He further clarifies that intelligent CIO understand the changing game, but are too close to their business to see the changes they need to make immediately. Dave Willmer (CEO, Robert Half) suggests that using consultants “gives IT managers the opportunity to evaluate people they may want to hire permanently”.
For expertise, outside perspective, focus, and experience, consulting should be a good route to go in 2010. If you’re not the CIO, try suggesting some consulting help for that new project you’re going to be assigned.
-IainR
The BI Builders
Ok, I get it. Windows sometimes stops working. No problem: just reset the computer, which usually restores normality.
I also understand that Windows has to constantly install its updates. No problem: the updates run in the background and install after you’re finished working, when you shut down for the day.
In theory.
What seems to happen to me, way too often, is that windows crashes in the middle of me doing something urgent. Then when I go to reset, it says “Installing updates. 1 of 37. Will finish after your boss has dismembered you for not submitting your report on time.”
Oh well. I have time to write an article here. On my Mac.
Maintaining a Business Intelligence Solution
This post started as a rant about my bad luck, but it inspired me to think about the equivalent situation for a BI solution. It just has to work. Yours might be the best system in the world, with interactive analysis, decision ready information at the fingertips, and driving strategic advantage across the enterprise. But what if it goes down? If I’m the CFO, and I can’t get my numbers in time for the quarterly earnings meeting, there’s going to be hell to pay.
Organizations spend countless man-hours making sure that’s not going to happen. It’s important to do. But it can distract IT from other strategic initiatives. And unless there are dedicated staff who are experts in Business Intelligence systems, there’s risk involved. What if the upgrade installation doesn’t go smoothly and it results in downtime? What if there’s a sudden spike in administration/tech support requests and you don’t have enough staff?
Remote Management Services
What if you could just “set it and forget it”. Have the same experts who install these systems take care of maintaining them. But not as full time employees … they’ll just work when they’re needed. Business Intelligence maintenance and sustainment services on a monthly contract:
- Installing, testing and rolling-out: upgrades, updates, patches and hot-fixes from the software vendors
- Handling and escalating tech support to the vendor
- Administration: adding/removing users, setting security and permissions, etc.
- Monitoring system performance
If I could have someone to do this sort of thing for all the programs on my PC, I’d be happy! And more productive.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
