InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

October 11, 1999

Chase Stays Ahead Of Rivals
continued page 3 of 3

Illustration by Brian Rea

Related links:

E-Business Meets Business Intelligence

E-Business Intelligence

And from our sister publications:

Computer Reseller News IBM Releases Business Intelligence Technology
In addition, Chase's risk-isolation and identification system, called GlobalNet, lets analysts and power users run reports that isolate the bank's risk levels by regions of the world, customer, and industry. In the case of the Malaysian financial crisis, BusinessObjects let power users create highly detailed risk reports and refresh that information immediately as needed.

"BusinessObjects has been a terrific help in terms of having up-to-the-minute details of our portfolio, which anyone can access internally," says Quintana, adding that the software solves the problem of assembling current information from multiple, distributed locations into a single, consolidated report.

Nevertheless, during the BusinessObjects implementation, Weinberg found that training users was difficult. "Users need to understand the data and ask meaningful questions of it," he says. "We at Chase have a concept of risk that is not cumulative. That is, you can't add up all the numbers and get an accurate result. So the user needs to understand all the complex algorithms that go into risk assessment for each trade; if a user doesn't understand that, it's possible for him or her to generate a meaningless report."

While Chase has not conducted a return-on-investment analysis on the system, Weinberg says, the BusinessObjects implementation has cut the report-development cycle significantly--what used to take months now takes one day or even a few hours--and has increased overall efficiency. "When traders need to make fast buy/sell decisions, they need to see the information quickly and in a particular format," Weinberg says. "Today, there's no lag time, since users are empowered to retrieve data on their own."

Next year, Chase plans to upgrade to BusinessObjects 5.0, which will add enterprise reporting features that let users disseminate reports to a much broader audience, says Aberdeen Group's Moran. "By blending enterprise reporting with their analytic tool, Business Objects has satisfied the needs of what might be called 'enterprise analytic reporting,' as opposed to satisfying only the relatively lighter requirements of workgroup reporting," he says.

Weinberg says Chase will also move its international users onto WebIntelligence 2.5, also from Business Objects, by the end of the first quarter. WebIntelligence lets non-power users perform query, reporting, and online analytical processing analysis over the Web from a single user interface.

"With PCs, every time you do an upgrade, you have to send people around the world to update the software. WebIntelligence solves this onerous problem," Weinberg says, stressing that power users will continue to use BusinessObjects in order to keep the high levels of functionality and formatting that are unavailable in the WebIntelligence product.

With its combination of business-intelligence tools, Chase can not only better run and understand its business, Weinberg says, but it can also stay ahead of the competition.

return to page 1, 2