Thanks for your interest in HP Business Intelligence. Our blogs on topics such as business intelligence, information management and analytics have moved to the HP Applications Services blog. Please visit us there for news, information and insights.

I'm so excited to introduce Donte London, one of our blog contributors. Donte is a Program Manager for HP Business Intelligence Solutions and leads complex data integration, information management and business intelligence implementations for HP’s Health Plan customers. As a business specialist for healthcare insurance analytics, his knowledge is very valuable to us. Donte, thank youf for coming back and blogging for us again! 

Care Management 360

“Top Challenges for the 360 Degree View of the Member”

Care Management programs are created to appropriately manage health resources and improve member wellness. Health Plans need to reduce their own costs by improving the health of plan members.  The best way to do that is by helping members ‘get healthy’ – by educating and engaging them in their own health.  Naturally, this has to be a highly collaborative process between a member, their doctors and their health plan.  It requires a new degree of insight into a member’s health and their likelihood to respond to different incentives and care management initiatives.

The goal of care management is to achieve an optimal level of member wellness and improve the coordination of care while providing cost effective, non-duplicative services.  Health Plans need to understand how to measure the processes of care, how those processes impact the outcomes of care and how both of those match up to the resources being used.  

In short, successfully delivering Care Management programs depends upon data. So, what are some of the challenges Health Plans commonly grapple with trying to meet their goals?

1.  Care management data haystack: Chances are your organization has care management information spread across many divisions, in various formats, spreadsheets, old mainframes etc.  You may not have the integrated information, reporting and analytics you need. If you outsource your CM/DM program, you have to ensure they interface with your internal resources. As a result of this information being spread across your organization and beyond, you probably spend…

2.  Wasting valuable resources: Too much time spent trying to integrate data from these sources, rather than analyzing it. Those of you with packaged software applications suffer with some of those same issues, but you may also struggle with the fact that …

3.  A solution that fits your need: Packaged software applications used for Care Management programs may not provide the flexibility you’re looking for or the potential for you to differentiate your organization from competitors.  Differentiation comes from doing something different, after all…that isn’t possible if you and your competitors are leveraging the same packaged capabilities.

4.  Too many cooks in the kitchen? There are often a number of different software vendors and consulting partners involved in working with your in house teams to deliver and continue to maintain your Care Management programs.  Many health plans spend significant time coordinating project activities between those vendors, who aren’t necessarily all on the same page. 

This is where HP and its solutions partners from MicroStrategy and Informatica as being highly beneficial to you.  We’re on the same page.  We’ve done the joint planning.  We have a joint solution that can integrate with what you have today.   Our aim is to make your life easier as a result. We can therefore help to fill care gaps, incorporate new member information, and increase member loyalty by ensuring accuracy. And we can use alerts can use ‘Alerts’ to ensure that Health Plans are ‘alerted’ to changes in member behavior so they can intervene and help the member better manage their health.

To learn more about Care Management, visit our website.

Connect. It's what we do with dots. It's what we do online. It's what networking is all about. It's the last thing someone thinks about when they are building a stand-alone data mart on a single purpose database or analytic appliance. It's not on the mind of the business sponsor who ships his data off to a cloud in order to get a quick reporting need met.

It is the answer to our disconnected world of information. We've seen people build siloed applications and store data in silos for years. Now they are building business intelligence applications in silos. Marketing owns its own set of BI apps; sales has their own reporting systems; finance owns the applications that track profitability; and product data management lives its own world.

In the world of connected intelligence, every element of business intelligence is tied together in a way that drives more business value and allows companies to respond more quickly to changing requirements.

Connected Intelligence starts with getting the data right. Most companies are already thinking of connecting their own data. We look beyond that to identify the value of connecting to outside information or looking at streams of events that would open up the world of instantaneous decisions. Industries like communications, finance, and energy have complex sets of data, complex data stores, complex data flows and complex networks of people need information to do their jobs. This is an area that requires more than technology. It's the combination of people, processes, and technology that helps companies lay the foundation for connected intelligence.

I recently spoke to two veteran data warehouse and business intelligence leaders in the retail and manufacturing industries. Both had been on the job for more than 10 years. Both had built mature information management programs in their companies. And both were faced with the same challenge: "How do I take the still complex analytics I'm producing, simplify the content, and get it to the front lines in the form of a recommended action."

Once you have the data right, the second level of connected intelligence helps companies use that new view of the enterprise in more ways than any other approach. It's all about connecting insight to action. Think of what you could do by embedding analytics in business processes or distributing the right analytic results to millions of front line decision makers every single day. When analytics reach the front lines, companies can finally make decisions at the speed of business and make every decision count.

Once the business is blanketed with analytics, the third level of connected intelligence opens the door to new business possibilities. What happens when you have connections between your business intelligence applications? What happens when you discover 5 or 10 new combinations of analytics that were never before possible in a disconnected environment? Innovation happens. You begin to discover new business models that support breakthrough initiatives. You monetize the value information and transform your business.

In the utility industry, I was surprised that most companies don't know their actual cost of power. As a result, their pricing models tend to require a mix of regulatory guidance, prediction, and intuition. If these companies could connect trading information with regulatory, demand, grid, and customer information, they would be able to create models to automate the pricing function. If they were able to connect this kind of data in near real-time, they could create a dynamic pricing engine that could potentially change the way companies do business in their industry.

That's connected intelligence, an approach to BI that connects analytics in more ways than ever before to drive increasing business value and open the world of intelligent innovation.

And this is why I love working at HP! I love working with a team of innovators that are committed to helping companies use technology in ways they never before dreamed possible.

But I'm curious what you think? What do you think about the idea of connected intelligence? I would love to hear your thoughts...

Post by John Santaferraro
Twitter: santaferraro

A recent tweet from an industry analyst intimated that he was meeting with a client who had spent $11 million on their business intelligence implementation over the last year and that they were still uncertain of the value they would be getting from the investment.  

This is a wake up call for anyone not currently pursuing a business intelligence competency center. The verdict is out: companies who started their BICC efforts 3 to 4 years ago are now using BI to transform their companies.

Since we've been helping companies align IT and business using the concept of a Business Intelligence Competency Center for more than 5 years, I've had the privilege of talking to companies who have mastered the art.  Just for the record, anyone can write a book, anyone can write a white paper, but I prefer talking to people who have done it and learning from them. That's exactly what I did; I talked to people who are seeing the benefits of a working BICC. Here are three trends that get me excited about BICC success.

TREND ONE: Business Intelligence Tied to Corporate Objectives

A common theme for BICC success is the right level of business sponsorship and the right mix of business and IT participation. With these two elements in place, we are seeing companies consistently tie their entire business intelligence program to very specific corporate objectives and aligning with the overall mission and vision of the company. In some cases, companies are even mapping every single BI initiative to a specific business processes or set of processes. This means that nothing is done in BI that doesn't have a direct impact on the business with measurable results.

TREND TWO: Move from BI Maintenance to Innovation

I'm surprised at the number of organizations that are still approaching BI as a means for driving more reports for the business. I'm equally surprised at the number of business users that are operating in a world of reports that stems back from the day of green bar reports.

With a working BICC in place, companies are seeing the walls between business and IT come tumbling down. IT is discovering more of what the business actually needs to operate more efficiently. The business is getting a better understanding of what can be done with business intelligence technology. The end result: amazing efficiency.

Imagine what it costs to produce 6,000 reports. Consider what it would be like to reduce the number of reports produced to 180 and exceed the expectations of the business. Even better, think about the resources you just freed to work on innovative uses of business intelligence.

TREND THREE: Emergence of Trusted Information

Because a working BICC drives toward data ownership, data stewardship, and data governance, companies who are doing it right are experiencing significant improvements in data quality. Companies who have been driving this kind of governance program are actually changing the information culture of their companies.

In today's world, the first thing you do when you get a report is question the accuracy of the figures. In fact, it's likely that you will get a second report on the same topic, from another part of the company, and you will find conflicts in the results.

With the right governance in place, you can maintain data heritage in a way that informs anyone viewing a report the sources of the data and the details of any transformation and cleansing that impacts the end result. We are seeing companies move toward certified reports or certified sets of data, stamped with the mark of the BICC, and therefore trusted by the business users.

The culture shift is simple to understand. When people get used to getting trusted information, they will immediately question or reject anything that doesn't have the BICC stamp. It takes time and discipline to change the information culture of a company, but it's worth the journey.

So, these are just a few of the trends we are seeing from companies who have taken governance seriously. And this is a wake up call for anyone not currently pursuing a business intelligence competency center. Or perhaps, we should be talking about a Business Intelligence Innovation Center!

I'd love to hear about your success with Business Intelligence Competency Center's. What have you done that's worked well? What results have you seen? Either leave a comment below, or send me an email at john.santaferraro@hp.com.

Download this white paper (0.70MB, PDF) to read more about how to implement a Business Intelligence Competency Center.

You can also dig deeper into the Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence for 2010.

Post by John Santaferraro
Twitter: santaferraro

Six or seven years ago, the idea of measuring the return on investment
(ROI) of your data warehouse was all the rage. Vendors suggested it.
Consultants suggested it. Perhaps your boss did more than suggest it. There was
no shortage of help, from meaningless equations on websites, to courses, to
whole books on how to do it. I too wrote and spoke about measuring the ROI of
the data warehouse, or more appropriately, the business application it enabled.
A presentation that I delivered at the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders
Conference reviewed the basics, along with practical wisdom from leading data
warehouse users.

The basic equations (including Payback Period, Internal Rate of
Return, and Net Present
Value) are straightforward enough:

 ROI = (Gain from Investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment

The difficulty, however, is in determining what values should be used in the
equations. Assessing the gain - business benefits and/or cost savings – is
tricky. Even assessing the cost is not that easy.

But That Was Then

At the time, data warehouses were largely discretionary. So it was important
to estimate and measure the return on what was a large investment, to justify
making it here vs. somewhere else, IT or otherwise. A few organizations even
calculated the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to compare against their company’s
hurdle
rate. Even those who didn’t do anything, usually believed that they should.

At the same time, not much attention was paid to measuring the ROI of order
processing, ERP, or other mandatory systems needed to run the business.
Alternative solutions were evaluated and compared on the basis of total
cost of ownership (TCO). Unlike the situation with the data warehouse, there
was no debate about whether or not the investment should be made.

And This Is Now

As
I indicated in a 2004 Computerworld article, data warehouses were destined
to become more business critical. As they have in fact become much less
discretionary and more necessary, the inclination to forecast and measure their
ROI has decreased. In a BI survey that Hewlett-Packard conducted with BI and
data warehousing professionals in 2009, fewer than 16% of respondents said that
they measure DW/BI ROI. Over 41% said they had no plans to do so, an indication
which increased over the course of the survey . Given the value of
staff time, it appears that this exercise is not viewed to be as necessary or
worthwhile as it once was.

Other Approaches

It seems to have given way to measurements that are more meaningful such as
including the data warehouse cost in measuring the ROI of the business
solutions(s) it enables.

When organizations evaluate vendors for new implementation, enhancement,
modernization or upgrade, being able to make a meaningful TCO comparison among
alternatives is as important as it ever was. This is by no means a
straightforward exercise. The advent of new configuration approaches such as
appliance packaging and use of analytic data marts on one hand vs. in-database
analytics on the other has made it more complicated to make an
apples-to-apples comparison. The approach that represents the lowest cost in the
first year may actually be the most expensive in years two or three based on the
variations in maintenance pricing, staffing and training requirements over time,
as well as the approach to upgrades, etc.

Given the flexibility and variety of data warehouse deployment approaches,
perhaps the most useful approach is to focus on quantifying the benefit of the
business solution while separately developing a rigorous comparative TCO
measurement of the data warehouse, data integration and BI infrastructure
required to deliver it.

The HP Business Intelligence blog is the home of news, opinions, and conversation about Connected Intelligence and its power to transforms the enterprise's ability to compete and thrive in an information-centric world.  We’ll be exploring market trends, comment on strategic information technologies, and examine what’s happening in the business intelligence space. 

We look forward to our conversation and to sharing views and insight!

John Santaferraro, HPBI Marketing Communications & Industry Marketing Lead

Vickie Farrell, HPBI Marketing Strategy