GuruOnline Blog

GuruOnline is growing every week with new contributors and sets being added all the time. Our international trade sets are one of the most popular, receiving thousands of views every month.

In one of my previous blogs I talked about the exclusive sets by the China Britain Business Council (CBBC) and the practical free business advice they offer on international trade and the benefits trading with China can bring to your organisation.

One of our new sets are from the Middle East Association, which similar to the CBBC, give free beneficial advice to business that could profit through international trade.

Michael Thomas, Director General of the Middle East Association, explains how major companies in the UK like Shell, BP and Rolls Royce etc set up the organisation nearly 50 years ago, to promote good will and trade with the Middle East region. Today they’re representative of 70% of all UK exports, they’re a non-profit and non-political organisation which ensures their advice is impartial and in your companies best interests.

Michael goes on to explain how the Middle East is the fastest developing market in the world, there is no other area or region of the world which is growing as fast as the Middle East, you just have to look at the amazing progress that’s been made in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries to see what’s going on there and no British company can afford not to be involved.

There’s lots of assistance out there for companies looking to do business with the Middle East, the British government is making a huge effort to promote trading with the area as is the UKTI. The commercial departments and the embassy’s around the region are much more business focused than they ever were too.

One of the major sectors which is coming out at the moment is the educational and vocational training side, the Middle East has a major problem, in that it has to create jobs for it’s people, about 50% of the population of the Middle East are under 25, and they all need jobs and training to do those jobs.
Populated countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are also looking for joint venture corporations with a world company; so, anyone in the UK with a good product who would like to look into a local manufacturer would also prosper in the Middle East.

Michael also explains some of the more particular details of international trade, including business visas and legalities, traveling and what to look out for with each of the major Middle East countries, from accommodation to customs to currency. For more international trade advice on doing business with the Middle East from the Middle East Association check out the rest of the sets on Guru now.

We’ve recently added yet another new contributor to our ever expanding list on GuruOnline, IT Performs Limited is a specialist information technology consulting firm.

IT Performs Ltd was established by like-minded Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehouse practitioners, who shared both a passion for the huge benefits that BI could bring to organisations, and frustrations about the failures and missed opportunities that they had historically observed – usually when called in to resolve the resulting problems.

In these unique sets, CEO Glen Westlake offers free business advice on business intelligence including how, from a manager point of view, you could benefit from business intelligence, practical approaches to implementing business intelligence, building your data warehouse, data management and data quality and management considerations for business intelligence projects.

So what exactly is business intelligence? Well, in general, business intelligence is taking your data and generating business benefit from it. So what this means is, taking data, turning it into information, creating knowledge, then getting it out to people at the right time in the right place in the right format so they can make better decisions to drive business benefit.

Due to the fact that business intelligence spans many departments and many functional areas of a company, you quite often find it exposes the differences of those parts of the organisation. The data you’re reporting at an operational level is very siloed, so you have a single set of users, a fairly narrow scope of requirements, so for example your finance package will do finance, this means they’re very isolated so they’re actually quite stable in their functionality, their requirements and the data that goes in them. As soon as they’re compared and the data is pulled together you start going across boundaries in your organisation. This usually cause issues of constancy, management issues around communication etc, so there’s a challenge there with having to pull different people together with different parts of the organisation, overcome users with different requirements, users with different skill sets (so you may have users that need information that are at the bottom of the organisation right up to users at the very top of the organisation) will have different skill sets and different views so there’s quite a broad span of enterprise, data, business and users that business intelligence has to cover which can be challenging. This challenge is addressed by only doing short deliveries into each department and have an organisational structure with a business intelligence steering committee and pull the bodies together so when there’s any conflict senior management can resolve it, prioritize and move on.

The above is just a tiny snippet of the information covered by Glen on, you can view all the sets on business intelligence in full on GuruOnline now.