Business Information Asean Sept 2014

Business InformationASEAN INSIGHT ON MANAGING AND USING DATA

ERP, CRM AND BI SEE STRONG GROWTH IN ASIA-PACIFIC

HYBRID CLOUD MOVES IN ON ENTERPRISE CONTENT

BEAT THE GAME OF RISK

SEPTEMBER 2014, ASEAN, VOL. 2

CATALOG OF RESOURCESBIG DATA TECHNOLOGIES OPEN UP ACCESS TO NATIONAL LIBRARY’S ‘TREASURE TROVE’

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2 BUSINESS INFORMATION • ASEAN • SEPTEMBER 2014

DATA MINING | TAO AI LEI

SINGAPORE LIBRARY MINES BIG DATASingapore’s National Library Board is using big data technologies to make the vast collection of books and other resources more easily accessible to library users and employees

As guardians of books, text and data, it appears natural for libraries to be among the first to explore the potential of big data technologies.

One such example is Singapore’s National Library Board (NLB), which has put big data technologies in to optimize its library collection to meet customer needs, to recommend books and to make library resources more accessible.

The NLB comprises 25 public libraries and one national library. Combined, these facilities have a collec-tion of more than 1.5 million titles and 8.5 million other items, generating more than 30 million loans per year.

In view of the huge and complex datasets it is dealing with, the NLB decided to use big data technologies to derive actionable insights across the entire organization at strategic, tactical and operational levels, says Kia Siang Hock, deputy director of technology and innovation at the National Library Board.

“With millions of users accessing tens of millions of physical and digital resources across Singapore, the NLB possesses a treasure trove of valuable data,” says Kia.

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SINGAPORE LIBRARY MINES BIG DATA






“The proper mining of such data unearths hidden trea-sures that can lead to productivity gains through better decision-making, customer satisfaction improvements through better service, and better use of NLB services and resources,” adds Kia.

Hide and seekOne issue that had to be faced was the sheer quantity and variety of books and items in the NLB’s collection, which it realized would hinder the efficiency of searches. With so much data available, it had to grapple with the question of whether busy users can find the information they require.

The NLB did not want to put its users through a com-plicated and tedious search process, but wanted to make relevant information more readily available to them. To do this, it realized it needed to connect up the huge and growing volume of structured and unstructured informa-tion resources in its repositories.

It decided this was where big data technologies should come in. Applying collaborative data mining techniques and text analytics to past loan transactions as well as books’ bibliography records can help its employees and library users generate better search results and recommendations.

“We started exploring text analytics in 2013,” says Kia. “We took a phased approach, and started putting recommendations onto electronic resources such as Infopedia (June 2013), Singapore Memory Portal (August 2013), PictureSG (September 2013), and

cross-recommendation from Infopedia to PictureSG (November 2013).”

The NLB has created a title recommendation service that offers more relevant data to its users on its websites and portals, enabling customers who search for a book to receive information about the book, plus data on related book titles. To do this, the NLB used a combination of internal and external resources.

“We built up basic internal capabilities, and leveraged partners and vendors in many of the big data implemen-tations,” says Kia. “Project teams were formed for each

big data implementation, and each project team would identify the data requirement.”

The system uses collaborative filtering technology – a data mining technique – to mine reading patterns based on the libraries’ past three years’ loan records. The NLB also uses content-based filtering of the books’ bibliography records to generate another list of

THE NLB DID NOT WANT TO PUT ITS USERS THROUGH A COMPLICATED AND TEDIOUS SEARCH PROCESS, BUT WANTED TO MAKE RELEVANT INFORMATION MORE READILY AVAILABLE TO THEM

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recommended books under the heading “similar titles you may also enjoy”, a service similar to that offered on Amazon.com’s website.

The system now generates recommendations for 89% of fiction titles and 53% of non-fiction titles, reflecting the fact that fiction titles are loaned more frequently.

The NLB uses Mahout text analytics software operating on a Hadoop cluster from the Apache Software Foundation. This automatically connects its rich collection of digitized resources to enhance the search and discovery experience of its users and improve the use of the digitized resources.

Dealing with scalabilityOne issue the NLB faced was scalability, particularly when dealing with the millions of newspaper articles that are available in its NewspaperSG service. The system ran out of disk space after just over a week of scanning.

“Through the proof of concepts, it was clear that the technologies of data mining and text analytics were rele-vant and useful,” says Kia. “As we progressed, we inevita-bly faced the technical challenge of volume. For example, it took minutes to perform text analytics on the Infope-dia collection of about 2,000 items, but when we needed to handle 20 million newspaper articles, scaling quickly became an issue.”

Although scaling up the hardware is straightforward, it was not feasible beyond a certain point. “We needed to be innovative,” says Kia. “We experimented with various options, and found a solution in clustering techniques.”

Another challenge emerged when processing the older issues of the newspapers. Newspaper microfilms were digitized by using optical character recognition software, but often had errors. These errors introduced ‘noise’ into the dataset and significantly increased the

complexity of the computation, resulting in lengthy processing and the need for a large amount of interme-diate disk storage.

To meet this challenge, the NLB adjusted the param-eters of the text analytics algorithm to ignore infrequent word tokens. Clustering techniques were also applied to segment the datasets into smaller clusters for efficient text analytics processing. It also set up a full Apache Hadoop cluster with 13 virtual servers on three virtual machine hosts to ensure a scalable, distributed and reli-able computing platform.

NEWSPAPER MICROFILMS WERE DIGITISED BY USING OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION SOFTWARE, BUT OFTEN HAD ERRORS. THESE ERRORS INTRODUCED ‘NOISE’ INTO THE DATASET

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These systems have enabled the team to reduce the time needed to process the data, and it has since pro-cessed almost 10 million newspaper articles.

The NLB hopes to introduce semantic information and language translation into the system.

Selecting booksAnother area where the NLB faced a huge volume of data was in the selection, sourcing, procuring and processing of library materials. The well-stocked library has a team of professional staff dedicated to this process, but the NLB also uses advanced business analytics to optimize the library collection for users.

“With the big data program, we have transformed the processes of selecting, sourcing, procuring and processing of library materials that were previously based on [human] experience and judgment, to one supported by data analyt-ics,” says Kia. “Millions of library users benefit from this, as they find library materials more relevant to their interests because their demands are automatically taken into con-sideration in the collection management cycle.”

This is achieved through the demand analysis (DA) and collection planning (CP) components of the NLB’s big data program. The DA forecasts library users’ demand for new and existing titles, and provides an aggregated demand forecast to the CP component.

CP uses optimization technology to plan the NLB’s lending collections by determining the category mix in each public library, maximizing the number of loans given the constraints of space, cost and budget.

The technology considers declines in readership and the age of titles in various categories in different librar-ies. It also analyses the fact that popular categories that are on the shelf for less time require less space to recom-mend what to remove from the shelves and what to buy each year. Setting maximum and minimum amounts for each category in each library enables planners to steer the collection to a good balance between relevance and comprehensiveness.

To date, the NLB has implemented a comprehensive range of big data technology across the organization.

“The user base touches all levels of staff – senior man-agement, middle management and operational staff,” says Kia. “The library users also benefit from the rich contextual discovery experience made possible by the use of text analytics. The big data implementations have provided better insights for future planning, improved productivity and increased the use of NLB resources.”

The NLB has come a long way, but it is not content to rest on its laurels, and has started work on geospatial analytics for library planning. “We are exploring content analytics technologies for voice-to-text, image matching and video content, so we can search the raw content of our resources,” says Kia. n

TAO AI LEI has written about the technology industry for over 10 years, and is the former editor of a regional IT weekly in Asia. She is based in Singapore, and can be contacted at [email protected].

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ERP, CRM and BI see strong growth in Asia-PacificAustralia stands out as fastest-growing market as Apac region undergoes cyclical change

ACCORDING TO FIGURES from Gartner, the market for enter-prise application software (EAS) continued to grow last year throughout Asia-Pacific, but not as rapidly as in 2012.

The EAS category covers such varied sectors as enter-prise resource planning (ERP), office suites, customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise con-tent management (ECM), digital content creation (DCC), web conferencing, and project and portfolio management (PPM) software.

These represent a wide range of software products and services, so it is not surprising that the overall revenue figure for Apac (excluding Japan) was US$12.6bn in 2013. However, not all sectors grew at the same rate. ERP, CRM and BI/analytics were the strongest performers across the

region, with CRM doing even better in Australia.Australia stood out as the fastest-growing market in

Apac. As well as the three strong performers mentioned above, software as a service (SaaS) and cloud deployments were key areas for spending last year, as were upgrades to existing systems. The headline EAS revenue figure for Australia alone was US$3.4bn, making up more than a quarter of the entire Apac total. And with 7.7% growth over 2012, it also grew faster than the region as a whole.

The same was not true of China, a much larger country than Australia but with a smaller EAS revenue (US$3.1bn) and weaker growth compared with 2012 (5.9%). Gartner puts this down to slowing domestic and export market demand, but says the whole region is undergoing cycli-cal change. Some organizations are consolidating and supporting existing systems, while others are moving to cloud-based or subscription-based systems as a logical way to grow their businesses.

And as regards software suppliers, which were the win-ners and losers in 2013? The same as those in 2012. The top five suppliers were unchanged (see pie chart, p7), but their individual successes and performance in the differ-ent Apac countries varied greatly.

Australia’s top four rankings were the same, but Salesforce.com was in fifth place. According to Gartner, the variation in the top five suppliers in Australia compared

DATA | ALEX CRUICKSHANK

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DATA | ALEX CRUICKSHANK

with Apac as a whole is due to the differences in technology priorities between mature and emerging markets.

That makes sense, because ERP is still the dominant software revenue contributor in many emerging coun-tries, such as China, with local suppliers playing stronger roles than international suppliers.

And what of 2014? We won’t know the numbers for another six months or so, but, given the cyclical nature of the market, it seems likely that overall growth will be modest. However, if emerging Apac countries start to demand the same EAS tools as the more mature markets, we could see another strong year. n

ALEX CRUICKSHANK has been a technology journalist since 1994. He lives in New Zealand and runs his own writing agency, Ministry of Prose.

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Supplier rankings Top five enterprise application software suppliers, Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), 2012-2013 market share

Microsoft

OthersSAP

23.6%

49.4% 12.1%

Oracle7.2%IBM

4.1%Yonyou

4.6%

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HYBRID CLOUD MOVES IN ON ENTERPRISE CONTENTOrganizations salivating over cloud computing benefits but skittish about putting business documents in the cloud have a new, best-of-both-worlds option

Choosing cloud-based enterprisecontent management (ECM) over on-premise software has been a no-brainer for some organizations.

Lawrence Gianneschi, a legal information and tech-nology manager at a New York consumer products com-pany, did not want to manage his organization’s ECM system and hardware. Moving to a hybrid cloud-based system – a cloud computing environment that uses pri-vate, on-premise resources as well as public cloud infra-structure – meant the company could avoid the upfront costs and management headaches often associated with on-premise software.

“I want to get out of the provisioning business,” says Gianneschi, who asked that his company should not be identified.

ECM in the cloud has become an increasingly attrac-tive option for companies with distributed workforces that need anywhere, any time access to information. But it has taken some time for the market to catch up with user needs.

In recent years, the ECM market has seen users run in droves to file-sharing applications, such as Box and

SOFTWARE PLATFORMS | LAUREN HORWITZ

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Dropbox, because they provide easy access to informa-tion and a forum for collaboration, despite security con-cerns. Others have defaulted to shared company drives out of frustration with difficult-to-use software.

ECM suppliers have taken a hard look at these defections and are beginning to build forward-looking

enterprise content management technology. As mobile devices, social media and cloud computing proliferate, the ground beneath suppliers’ feet is shifting. ECM software is finally starting to meet users’ needs, with perhaps the most promising prospect being the hybrid cloud.

SOURCE: AIIM’S INDUSTRY WATCH: ECM AT THE CROSSROADS; BASED ON 362 RESPONSES OUT OF A WIDER SURVEY

OF 538 AIIM MEMBERS. RESPONDENTS WERE ASKED TO CHOOSE UP TO THREE ITEMS.

Why the cloud?The biggest driver for putting some, or all, enterprise content in the cloud is cold, hard cash savings

38%

25%

17%

15%

14%

13%

11%

46%

Cost reduction in IT resources compared with running the system on-premise

Better availability across a multi-site organization

Improved mobile access and collaboration with people outside the firewall

Faster or easier deployment of projects and collaboration sites

Cost structure: trade-off of operational spending versus capital spending

Offloading ever-increasing storage provision to the cloud provider

More features and modules compared with what is affordable on-premise

Unlikely to deploy cloud-based content


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Hybrid clouds enable traditional ECM functionality, but also easier access for remote workers and better security than standard file-sharing. They offer a central location from which workers can share and edit docu-ments from anywhere, with version control, workflows and audit trails. And they keep sensitive corporate data behind the firewall, safe from prying eyes. They also enable records management and disaster recovery through file-syncing. In total, they can span standard ECM functionality with better ease of use and access.

Big future for hybrid cloudMany industry experts see hybrid clouds as having a big future in ECM. According to a May 2013 report from the Radicati Group, the ECM market as a whole is poised to grow from a forecast of $5.2bn last year to $9.3bn in 2017. Also, SearchContentManagement’s 2013 Reader Survey found that the biggest ECM-related challenge for one in five respondents was deploying and managing cloud-based ECM.

“If hybrid cloud matures, it will be the right solution for a lot of companies,” says Alan Weintraub, an analyst at Forrester Research. “It will gather steam.”

Before 2010, the legal department at Gianneschi’s company had no content management system, and it needed document management to govern information related to legal matters. It also needed a central location where its 200 attorneys in 33 offices around the world could share files with version control and a clear trail for documents, then integrate document management with

other key aspects of the workflow, such as e-billing, records management and legal matter management.

“We needed to have a place where attorneys could collaborate better, and break down information silos,” says Gianneschi.

Gianneschi’s team wanted a seamless way to manage content to prevent manual rekeying of information for better enterprise search. A system that could share infor-mation would also enable better management of records and information.

The company also needed ECM technology that could integrate with various back-end systems and manage the information throughout its lifecycle in those systems.

Integration, integration, integrationGianneschi’s company chose cloud-based ECM software from Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy unit, partly because of the software’s ability to integrate with IBM’s Lotus Notes and other back-office systems. HP’s dominance in the ECM market didn’t hurt, either. “I know [Autonomy] will

HYBRID CLOUDS ENABLE ECM FUNCTIONALITY, BUT ALSO EASIER ACCESS FOR REMOTE WORKERS AND BETTER SECURITY THAN STANDARD FILE-SHARING


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play nice with all of those companies because of market share,” says Gianneschi.

Integration with other systems was also important to ROM Reinsurance in New York, which handles workers’ compensation claims. ROM president and CEO Marianne Petillo says the company chose Hyland Software because it could integrate with ROM’s claims system. The net result eliminates manual re-entry of data between the claims and document management systems. Now the information from one can be fed to the other through the unique identifier of the claim record number.

Petillo says this minimizes human error from faulty keystrokes while also creating data consistency between systems. “Sometimes, if the system is down and staff didn’t get a chance to enter into the imaging system, a contract might be in claims, but not the ECM, or vice-versa,” she says. “But if the system is pulling it in, then you don’t have that problem.”

At InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) integration has also been a serious concern – and one of the key purchasing criteria for its choice of Alfresco One software, which the company brought into production in April 2011.

At the time, IHG had numerous systems, including SharePoint, Hummingbird and SpringCM, to house its company documents.

In addition to the company’s need for cloud-based software to enable third parties to access some of its con-tent, Alfresco One was particularly appealing given its

open-source code and robust application programming interfaces (APIs). Now IHG can provide interfaces to Alfresco from numerous back-end systems, says David Simpson, director of application development and inte-gration at the hotel group.

For example, the company uses Salesforce.com to schedule site visits to properties. With an API from Salesforce to Alfresco, the application can store documents associated with a property visit, and those documents are then also stored in Alfresco. Sharing information among systems is hugely important, says Simpson.

When calamity strikesPhysical disaster can threaten company data, but cloud-based ECM has become a real antidote to risks of on-premise data loss. ROM has first-hand experience.

“Having lived through 9/11 and then Hurricane Sandy, we were concerned that this could happen again,” says Petillo. ROM’s cloud-based ECM software enables staff to work off-site during a catastrophe and provides critical business continuity for data in the ECM system.

In 2012, ROM was devastated by Sandy, with its office submerged in 13ft of water. Displaced for more than five weeks, ROM’s staff needed access to its claims files and other data. Nearly 90% of the company’s essential data resided in one in-house server, in Hyland Software’s OnBase on-premise ECM system.

After the storm hit, work ground to a halt for three days. The goal was to restore business functions to


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displaced workers quickly. ROM shipped the server hard drive to Hyland and tried out the company’s OnBase cloud software.

Petillo says the security of having backups and data off-site and accessible in the event of disaster was an added insurance policy. Also, costs are offset by eliminating the upfront hardware and management costs of maintaining the OnBase server in-house.

“It was a bit higher than what we were paying monthly, but we felt the security was worth the differ-ence,” adds Petillo.

Cloud doesn’t always flyBut some companies and industries may never move their ECM systems to the cloud. For example, US-based CLS Investments has other back-office apps in the cloud, but it was not willing to move its ECM system there.

“We didn’t feel that comfortable putting all docu-mentation in the cloud,” says Jim Anderson, CLS’s chief systems officer. “We couldn’t validate the robustness of the system.”

Other organizations have considered putting ECM in the cloud but decided against it, given the complexi-ties of their industries. MedTrials, a US contract research organization that provides clinical development services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, wanted an ECM system that could govern all its content, from clinical trial research to back-office documents.

Given the importance of data security, Brian Morgan, chief operating officer at the company, says he weighed up the costs of ensuring clients that critical data was confidential, secure and compliant with all applicable regulatory requirements.

ECM software from M-Files fitted the bill. The soft-ware caters to the healthcare industry and provides a high level of data security that could be applied to all content, and there are cloud and on-premise versions.

Integrity of documents“Clinical research, which is heavily regulated and all about documentation, requires the integrity of those doc-uments,” says Morgan. “We need to be able to prove to the US Food and Drug Administration that we have ade-quate version control, detailed audit trails, controllable and differentiable access rights, electronic signatures.”

The platform has enabled staff to collaborate on a sin-gle, centralized platform, with more efficient workflows, while ensuring a compliant, secure information system.

JIM ANDERSON, chief systems

officer at CLS Investments, uses

cloud-based back-office

applications but didn’t feel

comfortable moving the

company’s enterprise content

to the cloud. “We couldn’t

validate the robustness of the

system,” he says.


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But industry regulations and data security are not the only hurdles for cloud-based technologies.

Performance was a key issue for Gianneschi, and that meant improving his company’s internal networks. “We needed to do some things on our end to allow better per-formance,” he says.

So the consumer products company bought Cisco Systems’ WAN accelerators, and the IT department tagged HP Autonomy traffic as “mission-critical” to speed traffic delivery. Finally, the company benefited from Autonomy’s moves to boost performance through software optimization.

And even with solid integration, which allows ECM systems to play well with others, the holy grail would be one system for all business processes – a “universal remote” of sorts for all content management, says Gianneschi.

But there is no single company that performs matter management, e-billing, budget management, document management, records management and IT management really well, he says.

Tomorrow’s ECMDespite the issues, growing adoption suggests that ECM in the cloud has a future – if users are brought along and suppliers heed the call for ease of use.

“In the future, every supplier will offer a hybrid model,” says Forrester’s Weintraub. “It will become more prevalent over the next couple of years.”

So while companies such as CLS Investments and

MedTrials have rejected the cloud, others in the industry say their cloud-based business is growing more quickly than what is running on their on-premise platforms.

Mika Javanainen, senior director of product manage-ment at M-Files, says last year, for example, the company had 60% growth in its global cloud software, compared with 45% growth in on-premise technology.

Javanainen says that for organizations that want mobile capabilities, particularly startups or companies without huge investments in datacenter infrastructure, cloud-based ECM software makes sense.

“If you have already invested in infrastructure, it makes sense to choose on-premise ECM because of the cost of ownership,” says Javanainen. “But a startup may not want to own infrastructure at all and go with a cloud-based ECM.” n

LAUREN HORWITZ is an executive editor in TechTarget’s business applications and architecture media group. Email her at [email protected].

BRIAN MORGAN, chief operating

officer at MedTrials, needed a

system that would ensure that

critical data was confidential,

secure and compliant with

regulatory requirements. That

led him to pick the on-premises

version of M-Files, software

that is customized for the

healthcare industry.


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NOW MORE THAN ever, business executives need a clear view of the perils that could inflict harm on their finances or reputations. Commerce is fraught with so-called strategic risks, from global supply chain disrup-tion and cyber security breaches to competitive weakness and corruption. And they are emerging more quickly and packing a bigger punch than ever before.

Despite such far-reaching threats, too many companies take the tick-box compliance officer’s view of risk – a mat-ter that should be handled by individual business units. But consider just one obvious counter-example – cyber security, which is no longer the sole domain of the CIO.

What is needed is a new approach to enterprise risk management, with designated “process owners” who have decision-making rights authorized by the board of

directors and CEO. Their objective is twofold: ensure that business-unit heads – the “risk owners” – follow well-defined steps for identifying, assessing, mitigating and tracking strategic risks and report regularly to board members and senior executives. This gives them a good handle on the risks that could put the company in a harsh light if any were to materialize.

Unfinished businessThe current sense of urgency about risk management comes from the greater tenacity of watchdogs and law-enforcement groups of all types in the wake of the global financial crisis. The US Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, among oth-ers, have been pursuing corporate mis-steps and wrong-doing with zeal.

Yet research by benchmarking firm APQC shows that most organizations cannot call their risk management efforts “best practice”. A survey of senior executives at 96 large multinationals indicated significant process weakness. Some 43% do not have a process owner who updates the board about shifts in the ranking of risks large enough to disrupt the organization’s strategic objec-tives. By contrast, the 57% that do have one feel confi-dent about identifying emerging risks.

CONNECT IT MARY DRISCOLL

Beat the game of riskOrganizations need a new way to guard against forces that threaten to damage business – and it starts from the bottom up

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That confidence comes from regular, well-structured and robust conversations among board members – with senior managers and the process owner present – about the desired balance between risk versus reward, events that could tip the balance and emerging risks. And it comes from everybody in the company having the right kind of decision-support software.

Digging out the dangerA good example is Exxaro Resources, the second-largest coal producer in South Africa, which distributes 40 million tons a year.

Exxaro uses governance, risk and compliance soft-ware from SAP that drives uniformity, collaboration and risk correlation. Saret van Loggerenberg, Exxaro’s risk and compliance manager, says that before adopting a standardized approach to risk identification and assess-ment, “finance had a high-level risk assessment that was done annually to ensure we comply with legislation and license requirements”.

“Safety risk management followed its own methodol-ogy, definition and terminology,” he adds. “We had an operations methodology that was also completely dif-ferent, and we had a separate project risk management methodology as well.”

Now Exxaro can depict identified risks on color-coded heat maps. The software also enables access to the “risk-per-page” report, which provides full details on a specific potential hazard. The report maps out a particular risk

– the inability to attract critical skills is one, says van Loggerenberg – its root causes and potential impact. The report also shows what controls the company has put in place to address the risk – more on-the-job training, for example. It also shows how effective the controls are and who is responsible for them.

The reward: peace of mindToday, Exxaro’s risk management efforts are highly orga-nized and collaborative. “People across functions, depart-ments and business units can have conversations about risks with different viewpoints on impact and different thoughts on probability,” says van Loggerenberg.

When people see that a risk has been logged into the system, they are on alert. “No matter whether you are assessing at a business unit or corporate level, if you see risk raised, you know you need to pay attention,” he adds.

By exploiting technology to help implement this reform of its risk-management processes, Exxaro can compare risks across the company more easily. “We are able to look at one risk across multiple business units and multiple projects,” says van Loggerenberg.

And that suggests where the true value of enterprise risk management lies: helping people grow the culture’s risk intelligence. n

MARY DRISCOLL is senior research fellow at APQC, a non-profit organization that provides expertise on business benchmarking and best practices. Email her at [email protected].

CONNECT IT | MARY DRISCOLL

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