Central Maine Medical Family is small by big-city standards, with
some $280 million in revenue and 2,000 employees. But the aim is to
get bigger by operating smarter. In order to meet that initiative,
the medical center's financial staff looked to
business intelligence (BI).
 | | | | | Instead of adding value to our
managers, however, we were spending all our time moving data
around, creating reports and emailing them to people.
Wayne Bennett
vice president of financeCentral Maine Medical
Family |
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"We want our finance department to be strategic, not
transaction-oriented," said Wayne Bennett, vice president of
finance at the three-hospital system. "Instead of adding value to
our managers, however, we were spending all our time moving data
around, creating reports and emailing them to people."
Central Maine Medical Family operates hospitals in Lewiston,
Rumford and Bridgton, Maine. Much of its region is rural,
stretching from northeastern New Hampshire to the Rangeley Lakes
area and just south of Augusta, the state capital. Some 400,000
people turn to the Central Maine Medical Center for medical
treatment, Bennett said, but many more "are driving by us," to
Portland and farther, for medical care. The center's big push is to
convince more central Mainers to seek "care closer to home" -- its
new slogan -- by highlighting new offerings, such as its cardiac
program.
Documenting how many people come into a Central Maine Medical
Family emergency room for chest pain and from where, and then
acting on that information, requires merging many data sources,
Bennett said. Excel spreadsheets were proving labor intensive and
difficult, besides.
Bennett started looking for a tool that could integrate
financial, clinical and patient population data to produce the
much-vaunted single version of the truth. "We needed
performance dashboards that aligned with our
strategies." he said. And employees needed to easily access
reports online, so the 30-person financial department did not
have to spend its days pushing paper. Business Objects Crystal
Decisions, a midmarket product from San Jose, Calif.-based <
a href="http://www.businessobjects.com"
target="_blank">Business Objects SA, proved to be the
answer.
A growth market
Bennett is not alone in turning to BI. According to a recent
report from consultancy Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., companies
are spending more on BI and using it for more things, from
complying with regulatory reporting requirements to measuring
system performance. Use of the technology has spread from the
confines of upper management to operations people, managers and
even customers, pushing what Gartner predicts is a solid 9.5%
annual growth through 2010.
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| BI use by SMBs | | Not using | 45% | | Using, but not purchasing or upgrading in
2007 | 23% | | First-time purchase | 8% | | Minor upgrade | 17% | | Major upgrade | 5% | | Don't know | 2% |
Source: Forrester Research Inc., 2006
survey |
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"It's very much a growing market for SMBs," said Michael Speyer,
who covers the SMB market for Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge,
Mass. The push is coming from both small and medium-sized
businesses (SMBs) and vendors eager to exploit a promising software
niche.
"Companies now realize they can get more out of the data assets
they have collected. The growth is also a reflection of the fact
that IT systems in the midmarket are quite mature," Speyer said.
"BI is relatively less well adopted, compared to other types of
applications."
No question the big guys have taken notice. Microsoft, Oracle
and SAP AG have set their sights on the BI platform market,
muscling in on pure-play BI vendors. Indeed, the variety of choices
can overwhelm, said Michael Schiff, principal of MAS Strategies, a
BI and data warehousing consulting firm in Reston, Va.
The first step is an IT assessment, Schiff and others said. BI
buyers need to identify the various data sources their
organizations draw on to do business. And, if the company uses a
bunch of technologies from different vendors, a vendor-agnostic
specialist, such as Business Objects, may well be the way to go,
Schiff said.
Simple, but not dumb
Business Objects' marketing vice president, Todd Rowe, pegs the
growth of BI in the midmarket as five times faster than at large
companies. "Smaller companies are producing massive amounts of
information, but what they don't have is line of sight into their
business, so they can make real-time decisions," Rowe said.
@37577 Business Objects rejected the route taken by many vendors
to the midmarket, Rowe claimed -- that is, dumbing down the
enterprise version and slapping a discount on it. He said
Business Objects' midmarket line is simplified
for easy use, but it isn't simple in terms of functionality. A new
edition announced Tuesday, Business Objects Crystal Decisions
Professional, provides data integration functionalities as well as
intelligent reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, and dashboards
capabilities.
The finance department at Central Maine hired a global
consulting firm and Business Objects partner, SDG Group, to help
configure the software, Bennett said. "They really understand the
concept of business intelligence," he said, and, more important,
were able and willing to meet with users and identify "what the
pains were" and fix it. "They didn't just install the technology;
they spent a lot of time understanding our business needs," Bennett
said.
A few months in, the system is getting rave reviews from users.
Finance staffers are a tad more hesitant about the change.
"You get comfortable sitting in your cube, moving data around
all day and producing reports," he said. "It is a little less
comfortable thinking of yourself as going out into the hospital and
working with people side by side and teaching them the skills they
need to build their financial acumen."
Let us know what you think about the story; email:
Linda Tucci, Senior News
Writer