CIO = Chief Intelligence Officer

Manali Angal, BI Consultant, MAIA Intelligence, on why a CIO is the Chief Intelligence Officer or Mr Dependable.

Manali Angal

The changing role of a CIO from Chief Information Officer to Chief Intelligent Officer has made him Mr Dependable. Today, CIOs are expected to do everything and anything and deliver results at the drop of a hat.

Considering this trend, Manali Angal, BI Consultant of MAIA Intelligence, identified a few pain areas for CIOs to resolve in their organisations so that he can play the role of Mr Dependable.

“CIOs should take up the mission of managing large amounts of data. Secondly, with mergers and acquisitions becoming the order of the day, and report requests coming in all the time, the CIO has to be on his toes.”

She added, “CIOs have an urgent need to roll out BI solutions. Most organisations have already implemented the top-tier management requirement on the BI side. However, they are unable to do so for mass reporting owing to the cost factor or being unable to find the right software.”

Another pain area is with regard to reconciliation of reports. As part of their IT strategy, CIOs prefer to avoid spreadsheets. Every time a spreadsheet report is enabled, reconciliation becomes difficult and time is wasted arguing about which number is right. Angal recommends that CIOs address this issue with the help of a single unified reporting platform.

Enterprises today run multiple applications, and it is hard for a CIO to have a single view across this data universe. Fragmentation of data leads to the basic problem that CIOs face. Companies invest millions of rupees in their information systems, but many times they don’t have access to the information that can help them achieve their business goals. This is called the BI gap. MAIA believes that it can help CIOs bridge this gap.

“Business users do not have the time to go through reports. Decisions and analysis are required at the click of a button. MAIA helps consolidate and streamline data for converting and shaping it with powerful analytics to spot future trends,” noted Angal.

There’s a gap between data and usable information. Most organisations are not getting the kind of return on investment on their information systems that they should. Angal recommends that information should be treated the way you treat cash in your organisation. Like money, information also has value, and that’s why it needs to be taken care of in the long run.

Based on SOA

MAIA’s BI solutions are based on service oriented architecture (SOA). It exhibits SOA characteristics such as independent queries that can be combined with other queries to generate reports. Deployment and management is also done as an independent process.

MAIA reporting solutions manage all the data in an organisation no matter where it resides—in Web servers, diverse data stores or applications. Moreover, the solutions work with relational database platforms including DB2, Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server.

Pidilite is using MAIA’s BI reporting solution. According to Angal, “The BI reporting system was inexpensive, within the company’s budget, and could scale to support thousands of users and beyond. It’s now possible to deliver the kind of intelligence solution that enables an organisation like Pidilite to better motivate employees, reduce cost, and innovate to provide a competitive edge to customers and partners.”

An effective BI solution not only ensures smooth functioning of various processes but also makes these cost-effective and in tune with the vagaries of the market. Pricing is always a big deal. However, MAIA says that their BI solution pricing is done in such a manner that you get a Mercedes for the price of a Maruti. ‘Full Paisa Vasool’ is their slogan.