The thirst for knowledge and the ability to seek relevant information is what makes a consultant, or any information worker stand out from the masses. This rings true on all levels of seniority. Aalto University has an amazing fresh new batch of just this kind of young professionals cooking up. Myself and our Head of Business Solutions Consulting, Samuli Sikanen had the pleasure of adding our secret ingredients to the mix.
Led by Professor Matti Rossi and as a part of Aalto University’s ISM-program the students are offered a course in Business Intelligence, a topic that is as important as ever. The course features guest lecturers from a variety of companies, and for the second time, Bilot was participating in its delivery. The lecture series covers all things Business Intelligence and we were given the possibility to offer our perspective on building a business case for Business Intelligence ventures, delivering a successful project in the area and the positioning and future of data warehousing in today’s world of big data and in-memory solutions.
The core purpose of Business Intelligence is to offer on-time information on the most relevant metrics to the information consumers of an organization. To enable this, the traditional approach is to build a data warehouse, that is separate from a transactional system. One of the reasons for this dual-layer approach is performance, more specifically reserving the resources of the transactional system for just that, transactions. While this concept is still valid for a variety of business cases, the line between purely transactional and analytical entities is blurring with the introduction of technological innovations such as SAP HANA. Bilot has already tamed this powerhouse in proof-of-concepts and our internal development (See Ari Varjonen’s earlier blog post about our Solman-HANA-Mobile BO trifecta, it’s very relevant stuff!), and the first customer implementations are well underway.
Staying current with the technical innovations is one of the traits that describes Bilot. Combining this with our understanding in the business side of things makes us stand out. Just like the students at Aalto University, we are curious by nature and aspire to ask the relevant questions and find the answers, where-ever they are. We are also happy to share what we know!
