| | October 202019It is interesting to note BI is a term we have recently decided to retire at Synergy. We stood up Business Intelligence (BI) as a standalone project a few years ago and while the project delivered much value in terms of reporting, we wanted a fresh start in 2019 with our increased analytics capability which is now a dedicated team with a senior manager reporting directly to myself as CIO.The original BI project's aim was to lay the foundations for a corporate reporting platform and build dashboards for our business users. But the BI approach was limited, and it was seen mostly as an `IT project'. This means it fell into a centralised approach where our ICT people controlled what data was given and how it was presented. I've always championed a more federated model for things like this where we give our business users the datasets they need and let them do what they want. They are better positioned to understand and use the data than ICT.I also find the term BI sometimes attracts a label (albeit unfairly) as merely reporting `after the fact' and business today needs much more. So, we've gone with `Analytics' as our preferred descriptor and this includes reporting but also predictive analytics and data trending too.We've come a long way at Synergy in a couple of years and a glance at how the ICT teams are structured highlights how important analytics is to us. Synergy has nearly 1,000 employees with about 100 in my ICT team plus around 150 others working for us through service partners or as short-term contractors. Synergy has four parts - a Generation Business Unit which generates electricity; a Retail Business Unit serving around one million customers in the populated south west of Western Australia; a Wholesale Business Unit that trades energy with others, and Corporate Shared Services with business units such as Finance and ICT.Two years ago we realigned our operating model to better suit the needs of the other business units. I now have five teams (we call them families) grouped into the fundamental things we do (known as capabilities) in Synergy. We have Architecture (future direction), Customer (customer facing systems as such our CRM and Web, Core Systems (internal ERP systems such as finance, logistics and plant maintenance), and our Operations area who manage day-to-day infrastructure, applications and production support.Rounding out the teams is our newly-created Analytics family focused almost exclusively on i n f or m at i o n m a n a ge m e nt , r e p o r t i n g , and advanced p r e d ic t iv e analytics. A dedicated team highlights just how important the analytics capability is to our business. But it doesn't stop there, and our BI AND ANALYTICSGary PeelBy Gary Peel, CIO, SYNERGY [ASX: IS3]CIO INSIGHTS
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