Critical Analysis of a Chief Information Officer's Strategy - IMAT5206

This report critically analyzes the CIO's strategy at Centrica, focusing on the implementation of data science, the migration to SAP HANA, and strategic partnerships with Microsoft and SAP. The analysis examines the company's recent IT history, including the evolution of its data management practices and its efforts to leverage data for customer service and revenue generation. The report delves into the details of the interview with CIO Mike Young, discussing the company's adoption of data lakes, development of proprietary algorithms, and the challenges and opportunities associated with the move to SAP HANA. It highlights the benefits of the CIO's strategies, such as improved customer service and operational efficiency, while also addressing potential issues like the complexity of SAP HANA and the need for employee training. The report concludes with recommendations for database management, employee training, and risk mitigation to ensure successful implementation of the CIO's vision.

Running head: MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Management information systems
[Name of the Student]
[Name of the University]
[Author note]

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MAIN THEME OF THE INTERVIEW AND RELATED VIEWS
It is evident from the visits of the top CEO’s of the software companies that Centrica
is evolving at a faster rate compared to its parent company, British Gas. Satya Nadella, the
CEO of Microsoft company is eager to make Centrica a part of a strategic initiative for the
utilities sector. According to the CEO of SAP SE, Centrica is one of those companies running
largest SAP instances compared to that of Apple and Microsoft and the company is looking
forward to change to SAP’s in-memory Hana enterprise resource planning system. Centrica is
deploying data science in its business and CIO Mike Young is leading a team of data
scientists who are developing algorithms to aid Centrica cater to the needs of its customers
and adding to the company’s revenue in data discovery stream by the help of a subsidiary
called Io-Tahoe. Io-Tahoe helps the company in managing numerous structured and
unstructured databases. Centrica is stepping towards developing proficient software business.
In this interview, Mike Young speaks about the strategy involved in data science
implementation in the company and the allies made with Microsoft and SAP.
OVERVIEW ON COMPANY’S RECENT IT HISTORY
Centrica reviewed its fundamental strategies according to the circumstances arising in
the year 2015. The review mainly focused on the capability of operations being performed,
efficiency of the operations performed, new sources of revenue and revising financial
backbone. The review concluded that the region of strength of the company was its way of
dealing with the customers and that company will focus on meeting the needs of the
customers. The Competition and Markets Authority granted Centrica’s request to remove it
from the Rough undertakings in the year 2017. The company dismissed the Rough facility
that was being unable to inject safe operations due to the conditions in which the assets were.

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DISCUSSION ON THE THEME AND TERMS RELATED TO IT
In this interview, Young has stated that the journey of Centrica with respect to data
management marked its start in the end of the year 2014. Centrica had successfully
implemented data lake including MapReduce, Spark and the things that usually are there in a
data lake. The data irrespective of its nature of being structured or unstructured was getting
into the data lake by 2015. According to Young, the company had enriched its intellectual
property by developing its own algorithms. SAP HANA to which the company wants to
migrate is a relational, in-memory and column-oriented database management system that has
been formed and marketed by SAP SE. Its basic function is storing and retrieving data as and
when the applications request it for. It performs advanced analytics and encloses extract, load
capabilities, transform and application server. SAP HANA is a mixture of OLAP and OLTP
operations and thus is named as OLTAP operation. Enterprise Resource Planning is software
that manages business process and enables an organization to work with a group of integrated
applications. Centrica had set up a huge capital venture and Rokitt-Astra, a complementary
data tools company was acquired. The company acquired Rokitt-Astra and Io-Tahao at the
same time so that it could sell data services to the banking sector. Every individual is
concerned with his or her data and the General Data Protection Regulation backs them up.
Young is of the opinion that the data science team of Centrica has become stronger than
before and now includes many specialists in visualization and analytics. He confirms that
Cambridge and Massachusetts Institute of Technology pass outs are a part of his team and
there are persons who are from engineering and custom operations background. The CIO
seems to be satisfied with the diverse qualifications of his team members and states that their
capabilities have been enhanced. Young adds that the company is looking into real-life issues
and is always ready to research and make developments on the results of the research been
done and a decrease in viable products is what the company desires.

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The team lead by Young has successfully developed a tracking system that tracks the
online activities of the consumers and can depict the journey details of the customer on the
web page. This development can help getting the information on the customer’s
advancements in the journey and give a clue where it failed. The company had no control on
this matter just a year ago and this was a huge problem. This helped the call centre to speed
up its operations and meet its customers demand. The team completed the development of the
project in just one and half months. This development has helped the company to come up
with solutions to the problems of the customers and this in turn is helping the company to
resolve their issues and gain the trust of the consumers. Centrica has developed a strategic
ally with Microsoft and this will boost the speed of work and cloud computing will help
accelerate the company’s market. Microsoft has talked of artificial intelligence and the
company’s data science and digital teams is looking forward to work with them. Satya
Nadella had chosen three basic partners and Centrica is the only partner in the energy sector.
The CEO of Centrica was invited to be part of an evaluation process in Microsoft and it
defines strategic partnership.
The CIO’s view was clear and the only concern he addressed is to improve the
company’s database management system. The team led by the CIO is effective in developing
the existing system and making it more advanced for the welfare of the customers. The
positive point of the theme is that problems of the customers will be well addressed and
resolved as soon as possible. The negative impact will be that on the existing employees as
they will be burdened with work and specific solutions has to be provided to the customers in
the steps that had failed them.

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ISSUES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS NOT MENTIONED
The company needs almost two years to move to SAP HANA. The company has
around 23 million customers and uses eight ERP systems in UK and two SAP platforms
being run by the firm are the largest, moreover it is the same system which Apple and
Microsoft use. The system is big-batch fed and is all the time behind actual time. Young
along with his team his finding out ways to keep the operations team updated with customer’s
information. In order to break through the limits of batch process, Centrica has agreed with
McDermott to change to a digitally aided back end structure based on SAP HANA. The
company has shifted its financial ERP from Sap to SAP HANA that ensures data is updated
every second. The topics, which should have been referred to by the CIO, are educating more
and more employees on SAP HANA and considering some disadvantages of the system. In
order to make HANA extra flexible SAP is developing newer versions and mixing it with the
older ones which is a hindrance on the part of a analyst to keep himself updated every time.
The case is such that only an expert in the field of database management can cope up with the
regular updates in SAP HANA. The security modules of the SAP HANA must be revised, as
under the privacy scheme of user, admin cannot access the data. SAP HANA also lacks in
effective integration with databases like SQL. There have been instances that a local
company’s server crashed due to HANA, the system had to be rebooted, reloading all the
data, and the cause was numerous numbers of calculations that had heated the system to 83
degrees and led to the failsafe mechanism of IC chip. Hybrid solutions that are the solutions,
which are using cloud and premise in partly basis are creating chatter on the system and are a
backdrop of SAP HANA. The data that already existed in the ERP system is being transferred
to the HANA database and thus the quality of data is questionable. Data archiving is not
implemented well and thus information in the database is added abruptly. Young says that in
order to cope up with the batch processing they have used API layer and made use of

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machine learning. The CIO can be applauded for its efforts as the measures he had taken have
helped Centrica to increase the processing time from the previously used 24-hour limit to 60
minutes in the batch structure.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Database management system being the backbone of any organization should top the
priority list and revising the existing database should be done in a structured way so that it
does not create any chaos and discrepancies in the data stored in the system. The employees
should be given the time to learn and get well acquainted with new systems and must be
given regular sessions on the topics. The authorities must be aware of the pros and cons of the
system which is going to be implemented and back up plans must be kept in hand in case of
future usage.

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