Information Gets Precedence over Technology

The most important aspect of the era that we live in, has been very aptly encapsulated by what Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, once said, Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire; it wafts across the electrified borders.

Making decisions based on several pieces of information is very common in our day-to-day lives. We all have to decide on things like which gadget gives the maximum value for money; which school is the best for our children; which restaurant to visit or movie to watch or song to hear, etc. These simple decisions are also well informed ones, and made after going through the requisite details of the situation. When the need for information is so significant in not just mission critical situations of an organizational setup, but also in our regular lives, then the question that should be raised is, Why should information not be given precedence? Information is the liberating power, which helps people to move out of the confines of their limited knowledge and explore what is beyond their horizon.

As mankind has made advances in technology over the years, what has changed is that the information which would have taken a good amount of time and effort to collate, analyze, or present is now more easily accessible, and can be conveniently processed to a form that is relevant, hence reducing the time as well as effort. This, I believe, initiated the debate of information vs technology, as probably at some places now more focus is given to the technology being used, rather than information which had to be delivered. As far as I am concerned, being the chief information officer, I give precedence to information and ultimate usage thereof, and then try to find technological solutions to help users collate, analyze, and access that information easily implying that while technology is important, ultimately it is all about information. One needs to keep in mind the classic quote information is power Technology helps in enhancing the power by processing, analyzing, organizing, and making information available to the right people at the right time. So precedence is still for information, technology has to follow as that is customizable as per the business needs of information and its workflows.

To illustrate the point further, the guiding philosophy of designing any IT systems at Hero Honda is to design systems, which address a particular business need and are completely aligned with the objectives of the company. A new technology is not deployed just because it is the latest verve in the industry, or some one else happens to be using it. We follow the principle of best fit rather than best practice because one size does not fit all. Our systems are designed based on the business processes and workflows, and the business users are kept involved throughout, because they should authenticate that the information they need is what the system is delivering.

A case in point is our use of Business Intelligence (BI) in providing information to users in the form that makes maximum sense to them, at the time that they want, and obviously it is there at just the click of a button. A business of such an enormous scale as ours has a huge collection of data being churned in every shift of each day. This data needs to be analyzed for dependent processes awaiting the required information. The processing of this data was being done manually for a lot of activities in the organization. So even though most of the times there was data, but it was either not processed fully or there was a huge amount of human effort required. Now, with the use of BI this data is fetched from our databank, analyzed, and processed into reports and dashboards, and made available to the decision makers in the organization. By making use of business intelligence tools to synthesize information and make it available to a broad set of users, we are trying to encourage an information democracy in the organization which enables us to generate business value, and stay ahead of the competition. To guarantee the accuracy of the reports generated, we have to make sure that the data is correct and from an authentic source. Due to human interface in capturing data, this sometimes becomes a challenge.

My aim is not to push adoption or usage of a particular reporting system by seeing how many people are logging onto that system, rather it is to make all the relevant information available to the users through whichever medium they are comfortable with. So if they prefer the reporting through emails over logging into BI, then we are more than willing to provide the same. For the benefit of the organization, we also use SMS for communicating with our users. For instance, our systems generate a lot of SMS based alerts which have improved the promptness of the actions that have to be taken thereafter. The most important criterion for any system is how user friendly it is, rather than what technological platform it is deployed upon. In line with this, increasing the use of information and analytics in decision making is one of the top priorities of CIOs across the globe, so that IT meaningfully reduces employees workload and helps them achieve higher efficiencies.

Almost all the functions at Hero Honda are using the BI reports and dashboards for their day-to-day work, and the entire flow of information has become seamlessly integrated across the value chain. We have BI interfacing with our SAP ERP, which is the backbone of all the systems in our organization, and it is the common data platform for fetching the required data. It is also integrated with the sales data punched in by our dealers, so that our managers do not have to dive into the sea of information, rather they have the data spooled, analyzed, and organized based on their specific needs. The time lag between data generation and report generation is insignificant now, and that ensures a very important parameter that the analysis provided is up-to-date. With the use of BI, our users have realized that there was so much information which met their eye, and all that information has also opened up so many fresh business opportunities. With every decision being backed up with accurate information, it gives them a feeling of being emancipated from the confines of judgments and presumptions. Since it started being in use, BI has been one of the most sought after tools in all the functional areas.

BI is a very apt example of how by keeping the need for information in mind and implementing a software tool around it, one can exponentially enhance the work efficiency of the employees of an organization. It acts as a bridge which enables information to move from the hands of few to many. This democratization of information is the most significant cultural impact of the use of BI. The purpose of an IT department in an organization is to improve efficiency and productivity of the organization, so as to help it achieve its vision. All the other systems that we develop are also done keeping in mind the same guiding principle, so that the user should feel empowered and not shackled after the implementation of the technology. What has been mentioned is just a glimpse of how systems are based on the information requirement in our organization.

It is foolhardy to build a new and completely unconnected system, and then expect the business users to adapt their working methods accordingly. This, in fact, is the most often repeated criticism of information technology. Often, a lot of thrust is given to the technology being deployed rather than the purpose of it, and hence there is non-acceptance from the users end or ineffective utilization of the system. In fact, even BI is in some cases plagued with this problem. It is an irony that even though BI always ranks amongst the top of a companys investment priorities, yet users complain of information overload at one hand and otherwise, an inability to get relevant information. BI tools are enabled by technology, yet too much precedence to technology can lead to sabotaging the purpose of those initiatives. Any IT initiative including BI should be started with the purpose of achieving the business goals, and hence driven from the business strategy. In the current scenario, where in most of the cases technology is given an upper hand, there is a need to push the users to use the IT systems. We need to change this push based scenario to a pull based situation, where the users are able to enjoy the benefits of the system in their regular work.

The advent of information technology happened to help people in mundane activities and let them focus on more strategic issues at hand, so information and technology need to go hand-in-hand with technology customized as per the informational needs of the users.

Let me end with a quote from Bill Gates, Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I dont think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other. However, within information and technology, I would quote Albert Einstein, Know where to find the information and how to use itthats the secret of success. So, the focus has to be on information and its usage and technology should be there to support.

As told to Drishti D Manoah
drishtim@cybermedia.co.in