The document is a guide to business intelligence and analytics from Hexaware Technologies. It discusses various topics related to BI/DW technologies for 2012, including trim tabs in business intelligence, data integration platforms, managing counterparty risk with BI solutions, data management and information management layers, and the different dimensions of business intelligence and analytics. The guide provides overviews and practitioner perspectives on these topics.

1. Hexaware Business Intelligence & Analytics Blogs Guide to
“A Practitioner’s View”
Latest Trends and Information on BI/ DW Technologies for 2012
Actionable Intelligence Enabled
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2. TOC
· Trim Tabs in Business Intelligence 1
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· 2012 Wish list for Data Integration
Platforms 5
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· Managing Counterparty Risk with
Actionable BI Solutions 9
Click Here
· Data Management, Information
Management and then Decision
management 13
Click Here
· Business Intelligence and Analytics- The
Different Dimensions
17
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3. What are Trim Tabs? – Trim tabs are small surfaces connected to the
trailing edge of a larger control surface on a boat or aircraft, used to
control the trim of the controls, i.e. to counteract hydro- or
aero-dynamic forces and stabilize the boat or aircraft in a particular
desired altitude without the need for the operator to constantly apply a
control force. This is done by adjusting the angle of the tab relative to
the larger surface.
As a metaphor, Trim Tabs are used to denote tiny components, which
Trim Tabs in
nevertheless have a great impact on things that they are attached to.
This blog post is about the relevance of this metaphor to BI in
enterprises.
Business
Business Intelligence practitioners acknowledge the fact that BI &
Analytics in any organization is a journey, an evolution over a period of
time. The canvas for BI is extensive and spans the business
technology continuum.
Intelligence Given that BI can add value in many areas of an organization and there
are many solutions possible in each of those areas, it is important to
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4. identify the BI ‘Trim Tabs’, i.e. those small areas that can provide the 7) What are the regulatory requirements for the company?
maximum value for invested money. In one of my earlier blogs, I had And many more. In essence, clarity on one aspect of the problem
talked about the concept of “analytics anchor points” – Business (business model) will go a long way in selecting the analytics anchor
processes that should be considered first for optimization through points (BI Trim Tabs) for that particular organization.
analytics.
Identifying the analytics anchor points in an organization is a non-trivial -by Karthikeyan Sankaran
exercise. In my humble opinion, such a process should start with a
complete understanding of the organization’s ‘Business Model’.
Business Model is a set of assumptions about how an organization will
perform by creating value for all the players, on whom it depends,
including its customers. From BI perspective, once the practitioner
understands the business model of the company, many questions
gets answered:
1) What drives the company’s success and how BI can help?
2) Who are the stakeholders and what information are they looking
for?
3) What needs to be optimized and how it can be done?
4) What is the architectural blueprint and how will it evolve?
5) How fast should information get delivered?
6) How much data needs to be collated and how far into the past
should one go?
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5. Data Integration (DI) platforms like Informatica, DataStage, BODS,
ODI, SSIS and others are the backbone for a well designed Business
Intelligence application. DI platforms ensure that all the required data
are provisioned at the right time, with quality.
In the process of configuring and running DI platforms, we come
across few scenarios where DI platform needs to be extended with
tools/utilities. Some of these scenarios are like analysis of the
metadata captured by DI platform, integration with other applications
like helpdesk and others. These scenarios can be added as a product
2012 Wish list feature to the DI platform.
Following are the features that Data Integration platform vendors
should consider introducing in the DI product.
for Data Integration
Platforms • A feature which can provide a Network-like view to understand the
dependency between tables present in DI process components.
DI process components are ‘Jobs in DataStage’ or ‘mappings in
Informatica’. The Network view should enable us to drag a table
and focus on its dependency on other DI processes and tables
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6. • Provide an interface to configure the default object names that • Design templates for scenarios like data archival or data cleanup
would be assigned to an object, like widget or transformation (as in from large tables, for comparison of two data sets (data set can be
Informatica), or an object like stage (as in DataStage). The a table or file), auto data type conversion will be useful for migration
configured name should be assigned when the icon is dragged of data from one database to another database
into the design interface by developer.
• Prebuilt integration with Helpdesk applications like Remedy to log Thanks for reading, let me know your thoughts on what are the other
data errors and job failures as a ticket into the helpdesk system features that you feel should be considered in a DI platform.
• ‘Data Element Aware’: This feature should understand a column’s -by Muneeswara C Pandian
data values like of ‘people name’ and then suggest checks and
validations that needs to be performed for such columns
• ‘Domain Data Aware’: This feature should understand the business
areas like Investment Bank, and have pre built data validation rules
to handle external data like Bloomberg
• Enable calculations like aggregation and metric derivation to be
interoperable with the semantic layer metadata of reporting tools.
For example if a Business Objects Universe is given as input to a
DI product, then the DI product should be able to suggest what
calculations in the Universe can be moved to the DI layer and the
suggested data structure to store the calculations
• Data Correction interface for analysts with the workflow feature to
look at the error data, correct, approve and re-process them back
into the target tables
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7. What is Counterparty risk?
Counterparty credit risk is traditionally defined as the risk that a
counterparty to a transaction fails to perform under its contractual
commitment for the variety of products that the Bank trades with the
counterparty such as forex instruments, letters of credits,
repossessions, derivatives, etc. Counterparty credit risk is an
inevitable component of capital markets trading businesses and
banking activities. The ability to measure, aggregate and monitor
counterparty credit risk ensures that bank’s external customers are
willing and able to honor their contractual commitments and credit
losses are minimized. Any changes to the credit quality and the
exposures should be regularly evaluated and communicated to the
Managing Counterparty senior management to make prudent credit decisions in their
investment portfolios and to reduce exposure to the deteriorating
Risk with Actionable counterparties.
BI Solutions Why is it important?
A counterparty credit rating reflects the best expectation of its
Probability of Default (PD) based on an analysis of its economic and
financial strength. In our experience it is typically assessed at the level
of senior unsecured creditor. Some of the banks and financial
institutions also consider country risk ratings and adjust the
counterparty rating based on this. This rating reflects a long term view
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8. of the creditworthiness of the counterparty (i.e. through a credit cycle) The framework should also create a work flow to make manual
though suitable adjustments (normally downgrades) are made based additions and changes to the counterparty and exposure information
on the market data. easily. Also provide critical alerts for risk rating and exposure
All trading counterparties are categorized into broad, high level downgrades and upgrades in the desired frequency.
industry classes. These broad classifications are designed to identify
pools of counterparties with similar business environment, regulatory Some of the common business benefits are
requirements and common macro-economic risk drivers. This • Reduce your turn around time for consolidation of counterparty
segmentation helps in tracking credit quality across different portfolios reporting.
and setting portfolio limits. • Create a Master repository of counterparties, grouping, products,
exposures and risk factors.
• Get alerts for ratings, total exposure fluctuations beyond
What should you look for in a framework that captures all analytics
thresholds.
dimensions?
• Monitor trends for dimensions mentioned above and faster
Counterparty risk analytics framework should provide automated decision making.
aggregation of data from various source systems that house the credit
and limit information for domestic and international counterparties.
Technical benefits are
Additionally this should enable automation of the agency ratings and
• Pre-Built connectors across source systems using excel interfaces
CDS swap spread data based on the information available.
• Prebuilt data models , Business metrics and scenarios
The framework should help create a central risk database that stores • Prebuilt data loaders
master data around counterparties, products, exposures and risk • Standard KPIs covered
factors. It should also provide an application to extract and manipulate • Prebuilt Reports and Dashboards
exposure & ratings data from underlying source system. MS Excel files • Data and Report Centralization analytics.
can be linked to load data into the historical risk database. This
database can be used to produce a set of reports and dashboards -by Sheba Fernando
that enables senior management to take critical decisions around
counterparties and their exposures.
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9. In the architectural set up of a Data Warehouse (or Business
Intelligence/BI) system, we can define two layers, they are
• Data Management and
• Information Management
Data Management performs the function of data collection from
Business Transaction systems, validation of data, integration of data
and provisioning the data for analysis and interpretation.
Information Management performs the function of deriving information
from the data stored in the Data Management layer and presenting
them as analytical reports and dashboards.
Decision Management is a new layer that gets added into a Data
Warehouse landscape acting as a connector between the Information
Data Manageent, Management layer and the Business Transaction Systems.
Information Management To understand further on Decision Management, let us define what is
decision and types of decisions.
and then Decision Management
What is Decision?
Decision is defined as ‘a solution or direction provided to resolve a
problem’. A decision leads to an action and in a Business context
action invokes a business process. Some examples of decisions in a
business are
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10. 1. A manager initiating a training program for resources on observing Tactical Decisions are made by Managers who work on predefined
quality issues in deliverable target values set against a metric and have continuous monitoring
2. A store manager providing the discounted price for preferred process over the metrics. Metrics are measures which define
customers on observing lesser stock and faster movement of performance of a business process like revenue per sales person.
products The decisions here are based on how a metric is performing
against a target value. These decisions are covered by the
3. An accountant sending an e-mail note to supplier on seeing a
Decision Management Systems.
repeated delay in delivery
• With the increase in the regulatory requirements, enforcement on
data trail and auditing is becoming very vital for every decisions
What is Decision Management? being made in the business. In the future organizations will have
Managing the ‘data of decisions’. Being able to capture and Decision Management as one of their key initiatives to address
understand the decisions that have been taken is called Decision regulatory requirements.
Management. Current products in the market serving ‘Decision Management’ area
look at automation of the decision process and do not to define
What ‘Decisions’ can be Managed? process or tools to ‘capture and store the decisions’. To build an
There are three types of Decisions, they are effective Decision Management System, a repository of ‘Decisions’ is
very essential.
• Strategic
• Tactical
Thanks for reading, let me know your observations.
• Operational
-by Muneeswara C Pandian
Strategic Decisions are made by Senior Management and CXO’s;
these are long term in nature and are dependent on the market
conditions. These are not covered by the Decision Management
Systems.
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11. One of the most interesting aspects of Business Intelligence is the
fact that it has a wide canvas for the practitioners to paint their strokes.
We at Hexaware have made an attempt to draw a boundary around BI
to make sense of its different dimensions. The artifacts that have been
used in this exercise are mentioned below.
In BI & Analytics context, the technology stack has the following
components, viz.
• Industry Domain
• Business Process
• Data & Information Management
Business Intelligence • Reporting & Dashboards, Performance Management, High-end
Analytics
and Analytics- • Information Delivery
The Different BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STACK
Information Delivery
Dimensions Reporting &
Dash boarding
Performance
Management
Analytics
(Forecasting, Predictive,
Optimization)
Data and Information Management
Business Process
Industry Domain
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12. Business Intelligence Stack
A prezi showing the components in each of the layers is accessible at
this link –http://bit.ly/pbzNiS
A more detailed view of the specific components is provided as a
Mindmap at this link – http://bit.ly/gEYGIR.
Product Vendors
Ecosystem
Mode of Delivery BI – The Dimensions Layers
Competencies
With this framework in place, Hexaware’sBusiness Intelligence & For more queries on our BI&A offerings please get in touch with
Analytics practice is involved in developing many tools and corporatemarketing@hexaware.com and
frameworks that can add significant value to enterprises. Please do BIInnovations@hexaware.com
reach out to us for any queries. And thanks for reading. “Want to keep up with the industry's latest trends? Visit our blog on
Tagged as: Business Analytics, Business Intelligence – A Practitioner’s BI http://blogs.hexaware.com/index/business-intelligence to hear
View, Data & Information Management from our experts
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