Iris Project: integrated and reliable information
At the initiative of Paolo Rocca, president of the Techint Group, the IT and Integrated Reporting team are working together to develop an integrated data management system able to share reliable information and inform effective decision-making.
A beautiful young goddess complete with golden wings and a rainbow-colored tunic speeding like the wind bearing messages between the Gods, Iris is a deity that in Greek mythology connects the Gods on Olympus with humanity. In Homer’s The Iliad she appears alongside Hermes as a messenger.
Today, as the goddess of information, she is the inspiration for Tecpetrol's Iris Project, an initiative designed to build an integrated information management model for the company. The idea is to monitor and visualize results and performance indicators, producing information that can be consumed company-wide, of use to management and different decision-making levels.
Iris is also the acronym for Integrated Report Information System. According to Pedro de Diego, the Business Reporting Director who presented the project at the most recent Tecpetrol Management Conference, “A year ago, the president of the Techint Group, Paolo Rocca, presented the need to work on a reporting system that enabled interaction. Six months ago, a dashboard was launched which browses through presentations and is capable of leading meetings with directors. This dynamic solution overtook the static nature of powerpoints, taking us to a new level.”
"The goal is for everybody as a whole to find useful tools for decision-making, and in the medium term we want this to become our main management tool," explained de Diego, as one of the project managers. However, he stresses that the idea behind this solution is that it is built together: each business sector works together with IT and the Integrated Reporting area. “This requires a cultural shift that is already underway.”
Up close
Iris's mission is to share integrated information presented in a reliable, automatic environment, offering access to multiple data sources. Integration means that, for example, production figures can be linked to safety and economic data on the same platform.
The project is currently ongoing, and the priority at this time are the corporate dashboards to accompany meetings. During the development phase, there will be profile options for intermediate management levels followed by a deepening stage where the emphasis will be on defining the needs for specific dashboards with the end users.
"With the project, corporate dashboards will be created that integrate the data from all the Tecpetrol areas, which is unlike the situation today, where each area has its own dashboards, so we can make information visible in different ways," says Sebastián García, IT Business Solutions Lead Analyst. One example of this is the Daily Production Report dashboard which is unified for all areas.
In search of simplicity, Iris will take into account user experience on the basis of a survey, minimalist menus, a change in the look-and-feel which is similar to what was applied to the Tecpetrol Intranet. It will also include a term search engine to integrate topics with existing dashboards. Automation, when there are still forms being completed by hand, reduces the chances of error. And being able to trust that the data provided by the system is correct, implies considerable time savings.
"It’s critically important for us all to work on data quality, as it’s the raw material we use to create valuable information," said Leyla Ayub, Business Reporting Lead Analyst. At the base of the project is the creation of a Datawarehouse consolidating the data from different transactional systems and using this to build indicators and dashboards.
"The project adds a new architecture for data management in the cloud, enabling centralized work by integrating information from different data sources," says Damián Mazzucchelli, IT Business Solutions Sr Manager. He’s in charge of coordinating the project from the Analytics side of things, with his team managing the operational dashboards and management tools that each sector has been creating in recent years. Their challenge is to build new data models and dashboards defined using Iris. This is a medium-term project, where there will be staged deliveries of dashboards and the expectation is that by January, it will be operational in the first phase.