The Human Resources Management Application

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

CHAPTER 4

Introduction

Four organizations took part in the research. Four types of questionnaires were developed including an extensive interview in order to enhance the results. They are all different types of organizations and work differently and this was taken into consideration as to further enhance the research. The four interviews were analyzed and will be discussed in this chapter. The purpose of this study was to explore the ideas of organizations towards Data Virtualization as a highly suggested data implementation tool.

The main objectives of this research project were to discover:

How Data Virtualization is being utilized and how does it operate

The benefits of Data Virtualization and why is it used to solve business solutions

Who utilizes it and why

The idea of data integration

Why organizations are not using Data Virtualization and what are they currently using (if applicable)

A total of nine questions were asked in an extensive interview and four-to-six questions were asked to three other organizations. The interview or organization that will mainly be focused on is the Bank in Qatar and therefor, an extensive analysis will be conducted on that business.

The organizations background information as well as the views, inventions and initiatives regarding Data Virtualization will be analyzed.

Views, Inventions and Initiatives of Organizations Questioned about Data Virtualization

Qatari Bank

Background

The Qatari Bank is a financial institution and was established in the year 2007. Their geographical location is Doha, Qatar and their main target market is Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. They mainly focus on targeting corporate customers and high net worth or affluent customers. In addition, in recent years they started focusing on SME or small and medium-sized enterprises. Headquartered in Doha, the Bank is one the leading banks and is a member of the Qatar Exchange since 2007. They currently have more than thirty five business applications running at the bank.

The interviewee was the Head of Applications Support and Development in the Information and Communications Technologies department at the Bank.

Analysis

The interviewee was asked about the applications that ran in the organization as to show how complex the environment of the business is. A total of thirty five applications were being used at the bank including various interfaces, databases as well as development frameworks such as:

The Data Warehouse Application: This application is a special one that forms the base or core of our Data Virtualization implementation. It is basically a central data store or database repository where all relative and required data is pulled in an automated way into the data warehouse from the different surrounding applications and is kept in the data warehouse for as long as it is needed.

The Business Intelligence Application: This is basically a comprehensive reporting and data mining application that can be used to develop sophisticated reports, dashboards and ad-hoc queries using the Data Warehouse as its data repository.

The Enterprise Information Management Application: Based on the acclaimed Business Objects solution, this application is implemented to replace the Business Intelligence Application thus providing the same functionality and even more, in addition, it has a set of modules ranging from data management and analytics, building and managing reports, data universal design and manipulation, data transformation tools, data import and export tools, dashboard creation and publishing, integration tools, mobile business intelligence tools, performance management and planning tools, enterprise information management, and information security and provisioning. This is basically the solution we’ve adapted to implement for our Data Virtualization framework/platform.

The Human Resources Management Application: This application is a solution implemented to manage Human Resources data and processes within the organization. It is used for personnel administration, payroll, organizational management, pension and compensation management, etc.

Enterprise Batch Processing and Automation Application: As the name implies, this application is a scheduling and batch processing automation for managing repetitive tasks that need to be run in various other applications on defined schedule and based on triggered events. One such task is the End of Day and End of Month jobs that are common in any banking environment.

Qatar Central Bank Portal Application: This is the application that connects the bank to the Qatar Central Bank for delivering regulatory reporting and other regulatory data required by the Central Bank. This application is mandatory in any bank operating in Qatar.

This question regarding what types of applications were running at the organization was asked due to a follow-up question concerning the challenges faced in terms of the actual integration of the many applications. This was asked to show how difficult it is to integrate an array of applications that have different types of interfaces, databases as well as development frameworks. In response, the interviewee has mentioned that there are many difficulties in any organization when it comes to integrating various applications. As a bank, it is very common challenge as the business is continuously changing their requirements and new services and applications. High costs and long time frames are the most challenging requirements as there is a need to find talented developers as well as resources to implement the integration of many applications as mentioned by the interviewee. Integrating several applications and consolidating them together requires a unique application or software layer commonly known as the middleware. This application is used to enable many different applications to communicate to each other in a standard and common way. This is another applications and a crucial one needed and is a must at bank or any other organization running several applications. This application needs to be running at all times as its sits between many integrated applications, and if it were to fail under any circumstances, the organization will be affected greatly as some applications will not be available to use.

Another question regarding the challenges faced in terms of data consolidation, manipulation and reporting was asked to the interviewee. In response, the interviewee has said that the Qatar Central Bank, the regulators of their organization, has asked them to provide a daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly set of regulatory reports and such reports are very complex due to the fact that the reliance on data that must be structured in a certain compound way. The data that is implemented into the reports comes from many applications and therefor they need to consolidate and join together the data forming the special or unique structured data required to generate the data in order to provide the reports to their regulators. It is mentioned that this is one of the most difficult challenges when using data consolidation, manipulation tools as well as reporting tools. The challenge of maintaining such high quality and strong data integrity is difficult as it is very important for the bank maintain a high reputation as well as for the benefit and security of its clients and therefore they must abide strictly with the regulations set out by their regulators (Qatar Central Bank) and maintain a high level of data integrity and accurate regulatory reporting with no data errors as well as accurate data reports.

Data Virtualization is the main topic of this report and hence the question of implementing the technology as a solution for integrating, consolidating and manipulating their organizations data and applications was asked. The Data Warehouse system and the Enterprise Information Management application were powerful and sophisticated tools used to as the central database repository at the bank and it forms the core of their Data Virtualization solution where it is pulled in an automated way in the data warehouse from the different surrounding applications and systems. The data is organized into multi-dimensional arrangements called ‘data cubes’ that are grouped together as well in an organized structure. This is called ‘data marts’ which forms the virtual data including all the required parameters and properties required to access the data. This virtual data can be accessed, manipulated, reported and presented using the Enterprise Information management application which sees the data stored in the data warehouses as a large virtual database that consists of all the data from all the applications and systems with in their bank. This is basically the implementation of Data Virtualization solution.

The most important aspect of this report is defining the actual benefits of Data Virtualization and therefor the interviewee has been asked about the kind of advantages and benefits that the organization has had when they have implement this type of data integration. As mentioned by the Head of Applications Support and Development at the bank, they have had several benefits of implementing Data Virtualization. The interviewee has listed some of the most obvious benefits to not only the bank, but their stakeholders as well as their customers. The benefits that were mentioned are as follows:

Reduce Costs: This was one of the most important and well noticed benefits of implementing Data Virtualization at their bank. They were able to reduce the cost by 70% in some cases by reducing the cost of integration for launching new services to their customers and providing new functionalities to business as per their requirements.

Reduce Time-to-Market: Data Virtualization implementation made all data from all their systems and applications available in a single database which reduced the time it takes to implement new solutions and business requirements which depend on this data, and thus and in turn this reduced the time it takes to implement these new solutions and business requirements and allowed the bank to launch new products and services in much less time than anticipated if they had not implemented Data Virtualization. This reduced the time-to-market and launch significantly.

Increase Productivity: By reducing the time to integrate and reduce the cost of integration, you simply have less issues to resolve and less projects to deal with in IT and therefore you ought to have some spare time to focus more on productivity in terms of gathering business requirements, implementing these requirements, and align with the business to drive more and more value propositions to the organization and its customers, and thus productivity increases not only in IT, but rather in the whole bank.

Increase Quality: Implementing Data Virtualization at the bank had a very positive drive towards increasing the quality of their data, reports, services and products and had yield a very high customer satisfaction and excellent business fulfillment. Data Virtualization allowed them to have strong control over increasing the quality of all of their work within the organization.

Results

The interview has shown how Data Virtualization is being utilized and how it operates. They use two systems or applications called the Data Warehouse system and the Enterprise Information Management application. These applications are being used as a Data Virtualization solution for their problems of data integration and consolidation. The interviewee has briefly mentioned how data integration works; by using a middleware application or a software layer that is commonly used to enable different applications to communicate together in a standard and common way. It is very evident that implementing Data Virtualization into their organization has impacted the business greatly. They have reduced costs as well as costs of integration for launching new services to their customers. Data Virtualization has made all their applications available in single database which has reduced the time it takes to implement new solutions and business requirements. There has been an increase in productivity by reducing the time to integrate and reduce the cost of integration. There are fewer issues to resolve now that Data Virtualization has been implemented and therefor there is more time to focus on productivity. The quality of the data, reports, services and products has also been increased and so has customer satisfaction. It is clear that Data Virtualization has served a great purpose in the organization even for the future of the company.

Scripps Networks

Background

Scripps Networks is an organization that provides all types of lifestyle media including food, travel, home and entertainment. The company provides several products and services delivering across many media platforms. They provide solutions and information to viewers by using their brands.

The interviewee was the Head of IT support at Scripps Networks

Analysis

The interview was quite different compared to the bank in Qatar. The interviewee was asked about the organizations problems before implementing Data Virtualization as to show why they have moved to that type of data integration tool to be used as a solution. The question was asked due to the fact that most businesses usually have a problem or several difficulties before they change to a solution, in this case its Data Virtualization. It is mentioned that the business runs in a very complex environment, however they were not a unified business. They have multiple divisions that are given several functions and the fact that they are spread out makes their challenges even more difficult. A company approached them saying that they needed access to a lot of data so that they may tackle a problem and therefor Scripps Networks had immediately thought of the Data Virtualization solution. They mentioned that before implementing Data Virtualization, the company was slightly new to the business world. The company that had approached them stated that they needed access to interactive voice response logs, customer care logs as well as what the customers are doing after the products have been deployed to them. They wanted to do this in order to deploy different tactics and analyze what the results are and their theory was that there would be a benefit to not only their customers but the organization that has also implemented the Data Virtualization platform.

The installation took about three weeks and they reached out to the key stakeholders of the systems and came to an agreement to install the product to their systems and source the data virtually. They had worked on integrating and consolidating the data together in order to understand the quality issues. The first thing they did was analyze the data and hence they came up with solutions for the problems and difficulties they were having quickly and efficiently. They contacted a technician and has employed an approach of trials where they had identified control groups of customer and has then employed different scripts and used the technician follow the script and monitored the results.

The question regarding how Data Virtualization has then affected the organization was asked. The interviewee replied saying that they we getting several improvements in customer satisfaction and therefor they cut down on manual work where they would have many visits to the customer homes asking about the products. They have also identified a cost savings as they came up with new tactics and solutions to their problems. Due to the fact that they were seeing several improvements because of the implementation of Data Virtualization, they have successfully become a national organization.

Another interesting question regarding the future of the company with the use of Data Virtualization was asked to see whether the data integration tool was going to be successful even in the long-run. The interviewee has mentioned that his company will continue to explore and expand their Data Virtualization platform and that they were going to expand a network of data inside the virtualization layer as well as expanding the ‘big’ data.

Results

It is evident that Scripps Networks has found Data Virtualization to be a very successful tool. Even for the future of the organization, Data Virtualization will be used to improve several factors of the business. This interview may have not been as comprehensive as the bank in Qatar; however they have shown other benefits of Data Virtualization compared to the first company interviewed. These benefits include the fact that they were seeing more improvements in customer satisfaction, saved costs as well as the fact that there is less of a need to send employees to visit homes of customers. This was also mentioned in the literature review where it states the Comcast, Qualcomm and Compassion have also seen a decrease in cost in support cost and IT cost in general. Data Virtualization has served a great purpose in their organization as they can now come up with solutions and tactics to handle the challenges that may come up.

Social Interest Solutions

Background

Social Interest Solutions is a non-profit organization that focuses on healthcare and is dedicated to implementing and developing technology that provides access to health as well as social services. They provide these technologies in the several states and countries in the United States of America.

The interviewee was the Analysis and Design Manager at Social Interest Solutions.

Analysis

The questions asked to Social Interest Solutions during the interview were similar to the questions asked to Scripps Networks. The interviewee was first asked about the problems the organization has faced before implementing Data Virtualization. The problems they had was that they needed to federate across desperate gateway houses. The interviewee was asked a slightly unrelated question regarding the challenges faced when implementing Data Virtualization and he mentioned that they were still a young company in that they very much act like a start-up business and hence their IT department, in general, runs slower than most companies and that they were more of a traditional large company.

The company was asked about how Data Virtualization has helped fix the problems they were facing. The interviewee has mentioned that they were more able to react much faster and surface much data earlier as they were more able to get what the businesses want sooner. Therefor they have changed the ‘personality’ of the of their IT department. They went on to mention how Data Virtualization has been a great benefit to them and that they were able to do more projects and that they have been identified as a way to virtualize data with several business applications. A question was also asked about future of their business with regards to Data Virtualization. They have said that they will become more able to react better to their business needs and much more agile in general.

Results

The Data Virtualization technology has served a great purpose to the company. Although the interview was not comprehensive, the important factors were still mentioned such as the benefits that they have seen with the use of Data Virtualization. They have seen an increase in the time to react to business problems and challenges as well as the fact that they can surface data much faster. They were able to get what businesses want much sooner and this mean the time-to-market has been increased. They were more able to finish projects much faster. The challenge of implementing Data Virtualization is quite evident in a sense that an organization that has worked on several application as well as business intelligence can easily implement Data Virtualization into their systems compared to young organizations. Data Virtualization has served a great purpose to the organization and will continue to be in the future.

Level3 Communications

Background

Level3 Communications is an organization that is dedicated to providing internet to the world. The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is one of the world’s top internet providers. The companies positions has been solidified due to expanding assets and is now one of the largest IP transit networks in the United States as well as Europe.

The interviewee was the BI architect at Level3 Communications.

Analysis

The organization was asked about the problems they have faced before implementing Data Virtualization at first. They have said that they think that the problem was common and most companies have the same problem which is that they have a data warehouse were data is coming in from third-parties and that they have an excess data that customers want to be able to use. The company was not able to make all this data accessible to their customers and that most of the data, when it came to consolidating them together, would not make any sense.

The question of the challenges faced when implementing Data Virtualization came up. The interviewee has said that the problem or challenge was common in a sense that the product, in this case Data Virtualization, is new to the company and that they did not know how to deploy it. However, the company that had supplied them with the Data Virtualization product has helped them to create an easy way of implementing the product. Over the course of time, they managed to figure out how to implement the technology, in to their business, in their own way. The benefits and advantages gained from implementing Data Virtualization were stated by the interviewee stating that they were more able to consolidate all the data and information together quickly and therefore the agility and the rapid deployment of the products was astonishing. Because of the large amounts of data from data warehouses, legacy data, flat-files and the fact that there were daily repeating operational needs, Data Virtualization was the key to consolidating all that data together to be viewed and accessed easily.

Results

Level3 Communications have had companies and organizations that have come up to them and asked to have their large amounts of data tie in with a third-party data. Because of Data Virtualization and the easy implementation process, they were able to publish that data for them to use quickly. The company has a lot of data and therefore accessing and viewing the data is a tedious task hence Data Virtualization was introduced to their business and has become a great solution to their problems of retrieving data to both themselves as well as their customers. The agility of the business was increased which was also stated in NYSE Euronext literature review where is they have said the business has become much more agile. It has served them a great purpose and will most likely continue to be a beneficial factor for the future of the company.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the results of the interviews conducted will be compared to the literature or case studies already presented. It is clearly shown that the benefits of the bank in Qatar and Scripps Networks with the use of Data Virtualization are similar to Qualcomm, Comcast, Compassion International as well as NYSE Euronext. All of these companies have seen a reduction in cost in IT and resources in general. It is vital to understand the importance of the reduction of costs. Time-to-market was also seen as a benefit to the Qatari bank as well as Social Interest Solutions and this was seen in several case studies. Productivity was also increased and this was because the solutions and tactics were developed much sooner than expected because of Data Virtualization.

A description was given by the bank in Qatar stating how Data Virtualization is being utilized and how it operates through the use of middleware applications and business intelligence. It is clearly shown how data integration functions and how it used to store and consolidate large amounts of data from many applications. Data Virtualization has made the applications, which are continuously running in these organizations, available in a single database which has reduced the time it takes to implement new solutions and business requirements. It is evident that Data Virtualization is beneficial in several ways and continues to be for the future of these companies.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

The projects aims were to provide information on Data Virtualization and its key aspects and how it is operated, to explain some of the benefits associates with Data Virtualization and why should business use it and study how organizations use Data Virtualization to solve business solutions. It also aimed on studying how data integrations works and what are the key applications or to consolidate and integrate data. This was achieved by reviewing actual case studies that organizations have done regarding Data Virtualization and how data integration and consolidation works. A qualitative methodology was adopted for data collection and was used to gain some answers with the involved Data Virtualization users about how they utilize it, what are the key benefits as well as how the data integration system has affected the organization in general. Data integration was also discussed with the Data Virtualization users to show how consolidation and integration works in an actual organization rather than what the case studies and literature reviews have to say. This was all done through the use of interviews.

A main objective of this research project was to identify how Data Virtualization is being utilized, how it operates as well as how data integration works. A description was given by the bank in Qatar stating how Data Virtualization is being utilized and how it operates through the use of middleware applications and business intelligence. They use two systems or applications called the Data Warehouse system and the Enterprise Information Management application. These applications are being used as a Data Virtualization solution for their problems of data integration and consolidation. The interviewee has briefly mentioned how data integration works; by using a middleware application or a software layer that is commonly used to enable different applications to communicate together in a standard and common way. This was also discussed in the introduction where it states how data integrations works; Data Integration, using Data Virtualization, can be done in a few steps: connect and virtualize in a variety of data types or sources, combine and integrate into virtual use of data and finally publish them as data services.

Another main objective was to see how Data Virtualization is beneficial, why it is used to solve business solutions, who is utilizing it and why. It is clearly shown that because of the large amounts of data and applications or business intelligence systems that are being utilized by the multinational corporations interviewed, Data Virtualization is a must and as there is so much data and applications that need to be integrated and consolidated to be used and accessed by, not only the organizations, but their customers. Because of the various interfaces, databases and development frameworks, integrating the various applications is a tedious task and therefor Data Virtualization is a must. Because of the use of Data Virtualization to integrate and consolidate the various applications the large organizations run, many benefits will come out of the use of that type of data integration tool. Several benefits where mentioned by not only the organizations presented in the case studies, but also the organizations that were interviewed. Data Virtualization may have a few disadvantages especially at first when actually implementing the data integration tool in the organization; however this is a minor challenge that can be easily dealt with. The advantages of Data Virtualization include reduce costs due to the fact that there is a less requirement of IT resources as well as the time-to-market, as mentioned by some of the companies interviewed. Because of Data Virtualization, it has made all the data, from all the organizations’, and applications available in a single database which reduced the time it takes to implement new solutions and business requirements which depend on this data, and thus and in turn this reduced the time it takes to implement new solutions and business requirements. Another interesting benefit to see through the use of Data Virtualization is an increase in productivity. Because of the reduced time to integrate and reduce the costs of integration, there are fewer issues to resolve and fewer projects to deal with which has enhanced the productivity of several organizations and teams. Another benefit or advantage is the increase in quality. Implementing Data Virtualization at the organizations had a very positive drive towards increasing the quality of the data, reports, services and products and had yield a very high customer satisfaction and excellent business fulfillment.

The objectives and aims of the research project were accomplished as well as the personal goals. The study has provided information on Data Virtualization and its key aspects and how it is operated. It has explained the benefits of Data Virtualization and why should businesses use this. The study shows how organizations use Data Virtualization to solve business solutions and looks at the concept of Data Virtualization from a global point of view. It has also showed the idea of data integration. Personal objectives were also achieved. The researcher has extended his knowledge on business intelligence and has gained skills in conducting research on a sustained, systematic and professional manner. The researcher has also improved his reading and writing skills and has improved the way he explains technical information.

If the researcher had more time the study could be improved by targeting local businesses to be interviewed regarding Data Virtualization. Local organizations should be targeted due to the fact more questions and answers could have been used to study more about Data Virtualization. Unfortunately, the study shows that three out of the four interviews were conducted over the phone and may have been slightly uncomfortable for both the researcher and the participant.

It was a great experience to have interviewed multinational or large organization that work in different countries. The researcher, at first, found it difficult to interview many companies regarding a topic that is new to the world of business and information technology. However, the results were still obtained and the researched is pleased with it. Overall the aims and objectives were achieved including the personal objectives, and hopefully the personal objectives will be achieved through hard dedication. It was a great experience and also great challenge to have studied a completely new topic to not only the researcher, but to the world.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A: INTERVIEWS

The appendix contains all the participant interviews. The interviews have been altered and simplified for better understanding. Participant 2 and 4 were not recorded and therefor the answers were written down.

PARTICIPANT 1 DATA

QATARI BANK INTERVIEW

What is your job title at the organization?

I am the Head of Applications Support and Development in the Information and Communications Technologies department.

What is the organization main business function and what is its geographic target market?

We are a Financial Institution or what commonly known as a Bank. Our geographical location is Doha, Qatar and our main target market is Qatar and the UAE.

Who are the target customers of the organization?

We mainly target corporate customers and high net worth or affluent customers. In addition, in recent years we started focusing on SME or small and medium-sized enterprises.

How many business related computer applications implemented and currently running at the organization?

We have more than 35 applications running at the bank.

What type of business related computer applications do you run at the organization?

Well, as a bank we mainly have the following main applications:

Core Banking Application: This is the main baking application for managing customer accounts, deposits and loans, banking products, banking transactions, interests and interest calculations, limits and financial risks, in addition to some limited customer and transactions related reporting.

Branch Automation Application: The branch staff uses this application for serving customers approaching the customer services bench. It also controls and manages all cash transactions in the branch.

Electronic Cheque Clearing Application: This application is used for automation of clearing cheques at the branch and head office.

Customer Relation Management (CRM) Application: This is used to manage and process all Customer related information like names, addresses, IDs, legal documents, etc.

Cards Management Application: This application manages and processes Debit and Credit cards information and transactions including cards issuance and renewals.

Automated Teller Machines (ATM) Switch Application: The ATM Switch is used for managing and processing all ATM transactions coming through the ATM network including approvals, rejections and security.

High Security Module (HSM) Application: This application is for managing all PIN codes of the debit and credit cards and includes high level of encryption and security in order to keep the PIN codes completely secure.

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Application: The AML application is used for monitoring any money laundering suspicious transactions and data passing through or getting processed through all systems and providing automated alerts and pre-defined actions to prevent any money laundering transactions from going through.

SWIFT Alliance Application: SWIFT is a global network used mostly by banks to facilitate the transfer of money across the Globe. This application is used to connect the bank to the SWIFT network and enables the transfer of funds all over the world.

QATCH Application: This is similar to the SWIFT Alliance application but is used for funds transfers for the local market. It connects the bank to the domestic payment gateway implemented at the Qatar Central Bank for domestic money transfers.

TERMS Application: This application is used for managing Direct Debits and Credits.

Output Management Application: This application manages all statements and printing for customers.

Enterprise Batch Processing and Automation Application: As the name implies, this application is a scheduling and batch processing automation for managing repetitive tasks that need to be run in various other applications on defined schedule and based on triggered events. One such task is the End of Day and End of Month jobs that are common in any banking environment.

Qatar Central Bank Portal Application: This is the application that connects the bank to the Qatar Central Bank for delivering regulatory reporting and other regulatory data required by the Central Bank. This application is mandatory in any bank operating in Qatar.

Internet Banking Application: As the name implies, this Internet based application was developed in-house to provide banking services to customers through the Internet.

Mobile Banking Application: As the name implies, this Mobile Phones based application was developed in-house to provide banking services to customers through the Internet on Mobile devices supporting multi-platforms such as IOS, ANDROID and Black Berry.

Financials Application: This application where all enterprise financial data get processed including General Ledger, Chart of Accounts, Accounting, Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, etc.

Data Warehouse Application: This application is a special one that forms the base or core of our Data Virtualization implementation. It is basically a central data store or database repository where all relative and required data is pulled in an automated way into the data warehouse from the different surrounding applications and is kept in the data warehouse for as long as it is needed.

Business Intelligence Application: This is basically a comprehensive reporting and data mining application that can be used to develop sophisticated reports, dashboards and ad-hoc queries using the Data Warehouse as its data repository.

Enterprise Information Management Application: Based on the acclaimed Business Objects solution, this application is implemented to replace the Business Intelligence Application thus providing the same functionality and even more, in addition, it has a set of modules ranging from data management and analytics, building and managing reports, data universal design and manipulation, data transformation tools, data import and export tools, dashboard creation and publishing, integration tools, mobile business intelligence tools, performance management and planning tools, enterprise information management, and information security and provisioning. This is basically the solution we’ve adapted to implement for our Data Virtualization framework/platform.

Human Resources Management Application: This application is a solution implemented to manage Human Resources data and processes within the organization. It is used for personnel administration, payroll, organizational management, pension and compensation management, etc.

If you have more than 10 computer applications implemented and currently running at the organization, then can you briefly describe the main challenges you face in terms of integration of such applications?

Well, when it comes to integrating various applications that have different interfaces, databases, and development frameworks, there are always many challenges foreseen in any organization especially those with many business applications implemented as required by their type business. This is very common in banks given the demanding and continuously changing business requirements and new services. The most pressing challenges though are the high costs, long timeframes and many difficulties to find multi-talented resources and developers to implement the actual integration. Also, and in most cases, integrating many applications together will require the introduction of a special kind of an application or software layer that is commonly known as Middleware in order to enable the different applications to communicate together in a standard and common way. This adds yet another application that the organization will need to support and keep running in a highly available way as this Middleware then becomes a very critical application that sits in the middle of all integrated applications, and if it fails, the whole business availability will get affected.

What are the challenges you face in terms of data consolidation, manipulation and reporting?

As a bank, we are required by the regulators, in our case it is Qatar Central Bank, to provide daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly set of regulatory reports. Such reports are very complex in their nature because of the reliance on data that must be structured in a certain compound way. Not only that, but the data comes from many separate sources or applications and needs to be correlated and joined together thus forming the special structured data required to generate the reports. This is really one of the most challenging aspect of data consolidation, manipulation and reporting. Also, as a bank, it is very important for us and for our reputation as well as for the benefit and security of our clients, we must abide very strictly with the regulations set by our regulators, and therefore we maintain a high level of data integrity and accurate regulatory reporting that is required for the Central Bank with no data errors and highly accurate reports, and this is also a challenge to maintain such high quality and strong data integrity.

Did you consider implementing Data Virtualization solutions in your organization?

As I mentioned before that we had implemented an Enterprise Information Management system or application as well as a very sophisticated and powerful Data Warehouse system that acts as our central database repository and forms the core of our Data Virtualization solution where all relative and required data is pulled in an automated way into the data warehouse from the different surrounding applications or systems. The data is then organized into multi-dimensional structures called data cubes that are grouped together as well in an organized way in what is called data marts which forms the virtual data including all required parameters and properties that is required to access the data. This virtual data can then be accessed, manipulated, reported and presented using the Enterprise Information Management application which sees the data stored in the data warehouse as a large virtual database that consists of all data from all applications or systems within the bank. This is basically our implementation of a Data Virtualization solution.

By implementing Data Virtualization in your organization, what were the benefits of such implementation?

There are so many benefits of implementing Data Virtualization within any organization. To list a few, or may be the most obvious benefits to us and also to our customers and stakeholders in implementing Data Virtualization are:

Reduce Costs: This was one of the most important and well noticed benefit of implementing Data Virtualization at the bank. We were able to reduce the cost by 70% in some cases by reducing the cost of integration for launching new services to our customers and providing new functionalities to business as per their requirements.

Reduce Time-to-Market: Data Virtualization implementation made all data from all systems and applications available in a single database which reduced the time it takes to implement new solutions and business requirements which depend on this data, and thus and in turn this reduced the time it takes to implement these new solutions and business requirements and allowed the bank to launch new products and services in much less time that anticipated if we had not implemented Data Virtualization. This reduced the time-to-market and launch significantly.

Increase Productivity: By reducing the time to integrate and reduce the cost of integration, you simply have less issues to resolve and less projects to deal with in IT and therefore you ought to have some spare time to focus more on productivity in terms of gathering business requirements, implementing these requirements, and align with the business to drive more and more value propositions to the organization and its customers, and thus productivity increases not only in IT, but rather in the whole bank.

Increase Quality: Implementing Data Virtualization at the bank had a very positive drive towards increasing the quality of our data, reports, services and products and had yield a very high customer satisfaction and excellent business fulfillment. Data Virtualization allowed us to have strong control over increasing the quality of all of our work within the organization.

PARTICIPANT 2 DATA

SCRIPPS NETWORKS INTERVIEW

What is your job title at the organization?

I am the Head of IT support at Scripps Networks.

What was the business problem that you faced where Data Virtualization was a good solution?

At our organization, we have a very complex environment. The business was growing overtime through acquisitions, so we were not a unified organization. We have multiple divisions given lots of functions and we are spread out, we are not all in one location so when a business partner came to us and said that they need access to a lot of data so that they can tackle a problem, we immediately thought about the Data Virtualization approach and the platform we have with a company and the basic problem was we had technicians in the field to interact with the customers and it’s our first introduction to our customers so we recognized we needed to be experienced and there were different approaches to take and they didn’t know what was working.

So they came to use saying that we need access to interactive voice response logs, we need access to customers care logs, we need access to what the customers are doing after they get the products deployed to them. And we want all this together so that we can deploy different tactics and analyze what the results are, adjust the tactics and then hopefully the theory was there would be a benefit to not only the customer but the organization that implements the Data Virtualization platform in to businesses. We undertook the project and in about 3 weeks we reached out to the stakeholders of the key systems and came up with an agreement to plug into their systems and source the data virtually. We worked on integrating the data together to understand the data quality issues, where there were gaps and more and present it in a view back to our business partner. And the first thing they did was analyze, they didn’t know what they needed to see yet, so they analyzed and came up with their theories and how they were going to influence the tactics of the technician. After that they employed an approach of trials where they identified control groups of customers and then trial groups and they employ different scripts in those trials and they would send the technician on their way and go do your thing but follow this script and they went through it and monitored the results.

What were the results of using Data Virtualization?

We were finding that we were getting improvements in customer satisfaction scores and so we cut down on teamwork late because we cut down on visits to the customers’ houses. In addition the business partner identified a cost savings which is very important and surprising as they saved on tactics. Because of this success they went national so the whole program was turned into a formal approach and they revised a way to go into the field across the board now they improved customer satisfaction and reduced operating costs.

Can you tell me more about the future of your organization and the use of Data Virtualization?

We want to continue to explore and expand our Data Virtualization platform. We are going to look for and expand a network of data inside the virtualization layer and we are also going to look to expand the big data.

PARTICIPANT 3 DATA

SOCIAL INTEREST SOLUTIONS INTERVIEW

What is your job title at the organization?

I am the Analysis and Design Manager at Social Interest Solutions.

What was the business problem that you faced where Data Virtualization was a good solution?

A couple of years ago, we approached a company to come in and have a chat with us about a platform. The specific business problem that we had was that we needed to federate across desperate gateway houses and the Data Virtualization platform, which was recommended from that company, was seen as a good solution at the time to achieve it

What were the challenges faced when implementing Data Virtualization?

Some really big challenges. Especially since we are a relatively young company, about 20 years of age. We are relatively big, about 20,000 people in our organization but we still act very much like a startup so the business is very fluid and agile but IT in general is slightly slower and our company is more of a traditional big company. But, we have turned the tables and are working much more agile.

So, how has Data Virtualization helped fix the problems you had?

When we get a request, we were more able to react faster, surface data much earlier; we were able to get what the businesses want sooner, time-to-market, if you like. We have sort of changed the personality of IT. Traditional data warehouse life-cycle is going away really.

What were the results of using Data Virtualization?

So, we are still early in our journey, but from what we have already done and seen, its provided a lot of conversation in the business, so a lot of projects have been identified as something we could virtualize our data with, a lot of operational Business Intelligence – applications, if you like.

Can you tell me more about the future of your organization and the use of Data Virtualization?

That’s an interesting question. I think were we are going is a lot of what we do will come by our virtualization platform, and we will still keep our desperate data warehouses back-to-back and we see ourselves reacting better to our business needs and being as agile as what our business is.

PARTICIPANT 4 DATA

LEVEL3 COMMUNICATIONS INTERVIEW

What is your job title at the organization?

I am the BI Architect at Level3 Communications.

What was the business problem that you faced where Data Virtualization was a good solution?

I think our problem is the same problem everybody has, and that we have a data warehouse but we also have legacy data and older data warehouses, we have data that comes in from third-parties, we have excess data that people want to use, that previously with just reporting through IBM’s Cognos, we weren’t able to tap into and tie in all that data. We were trying to bring together the different sources of data. To bring all the data together, we weren’t able to make sense of it.

What were the challenges faced when implementing Data Virtualization?

I think it’s just the problems you would have with any new product and the learning curve and different syntax and how do we want to actively deploy the product. But the company that supplied us with the Data Virtualization technology came in and helped us create an easy way of implementing the product. We followed their module and over the course of time using their technical support and doing more projects we figured out how we wanted to implement the technology ourselves.

So, how has Data Virtualization helped fix the problems you had, what were the benefits?

I think the big thing is that we have a robust EDW (Enterprise Data Warehouse) with a lot of data in there, so we have daily repeating operational needs and we have that data elsewhere and we have legacy, corporate data warehousing and flat-files coming in. So, now we were able to tie in all that information together quickly, the agility and the rapid deployment of the product were astonishing. I think the 2 biggest benefits of it and what we have seen is we have businesses often come to us and say we have data in the warehouse and we want to tie that into maybe this third-party data. We are getting back and it’s just a simple drag and drop, select and join and it’s published and out there for them to use.