Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/286290
52 maltatoday, SUNDAY, 30 MARCH 2014 ON the 26th March, FTIAS Ltd. and Meeting Point Malta Ltd., subsidiar- ies of FTI Touristik Group GmbH, put pen on paper after making the decision to move their operations to SmartCity Malta. Present for the signing were, Minister for the Economy, Investment and Small Business, Hon. Chris Car- dona, CEO of SmartCity Malta, An- thony P. Tabone, Managing Director at FTIAS, Kevin Paris, CFO for Meet- ing Point International, Joe Gauci and Managing Director for Meeting Point Malta, Martin Farrugia. FTI Touristik Group operations in Malta will be setting up offices in the newly developed SCM02 and SCM03 facilities at SmartCity Malta compris- ing a total area of 3900 square metres. Spread out over three floors, the facili- ties will be home to over 250 persons, who are currently in employment with FTIAS, Meeting Point Malta and Meeting Point International, as well as their partners and business clients. FTI Touristik Group (formerly Fro- sch Touristik GmbH) was set up in 1983 by the current CEO, Dietmar Gunz. The Group employs over 3,500 employees worldwide and has grown into a vertically integrated travel serv- ices provider comprising of different tour operator brands selling through various channels including a fully- owned travel shopping channel, son- nenklar.TV. The Group provides in- bound operations in 18 countries and 42 locations under the Meeting Point brand (www.meeting-point.com), as well as the provision of direct services through group-owned hotels and a cruise liner. FTI Touristik now holds a footprint across the globe with opera- tions in Europe, Asia, North America, Africa and the Middle East. FTI Touristik (www.fti.de) is the tour operator responsible for bringing the largest amount of holiday-makers to the Maltese islands from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and has held operations in our country for the past 31 years. FTIAS (www.FTIAS.com, formerly Finserv Limited) was origi- nally set-up in 1990 to assist in the preparation of management accounts, reporting and the processing of in- voices for the local Destination Man- agement Company. Over the years, by demonstrating the ability to work in an efficient and effective manner, the company managed to take over the responsibility for handling creditors' operations for the group internation- ally. The Group's inbound company, Meeting Point Malta, is a Destina- tion Management Company offering fully fledged assistance to a number of tour operators and their respective clients. Kevin Paris, Managing Director of FTIAS sees the planned move to the offices in SmartCity Malta as a new and important milestone for the Group's operations in Malta which serves as testimony to the contin- ued growth experienced over these past years. In his address during the signing he commented, "Over these years we have moved from strength to strength and we are now at a point where we need additional physical space to meet our business needs. The move to SmartCity Malta will offer us the opportunity not only to continue growing our work force and resources, but also to offer a special work experience to our employees, and the means to better service our clients. With state-of-the-art training facilities, as well as areas for recrea- tion taking the form of a lounge area, a fully equipped kitchen/dining area canteen and a gaming section, we are looking at not only meeting business needs, but also the social and well- being aspects of our colleagues." "FTIAS started off 2012 with 120 employees but is now looking to top the 200 mark by the end of this year, representing a 60% increment over a span of three years. The company is projecting a further growth of 50 em- ployees by 2015. In order to address the increased business demand, we have had to grow our numbers. This entails an increase of over two mil- lion Euro in salaries over the next three years together with a further investment of more than two million Euro in capital and lease expenditure. Our company has continued consoli- dating its core operations relating to the creditors' function within the group, but we have also extended our IT, projects and human resources departments to address our internal requirements and those of our third party clients," Mr Paris concluded. Within this period of growth, we are proud that we are offering our employees not simply a job with an end-of-month pay, but a career op- portunity with prospects for learn- ing, growth and development. FTIAS has invested heavily in in- ternal and external training and has assisted employees in lifelong learn- ing by funding studies at diploma, degree and masters level. FTIAS is an Equal Opportunities Employer, and is a certified training institute as accredited by National Commis- sion for Further and Higher Educa- tion (NCFHE). The company won the People Management Impact on Business Success in the 2013 FHRD Awards, and the 2011 FHRD Excel- lence Award. Speaking about this new partner- ship, SmartCity Malta CEO, Anthony P. Tabone said: "We are delighted to welcome FTIAS and Meeting Point Malta on board, as this relationship is in line with SmartCity Malta's ob- jective to attract foreign direct invest- ment and generate further job oppor- tunities. Besides working to continue attracting international companies, SmartCity Malta also facilitates the development of indigenous business- es and supports entrepreneurs and teams with great ideas and potential." "The SmartCity Malta project has the most advanced ICT infrastructure in Malta. Through a progressive inte- gration of technology and services, this infrastructure meets the techni- cal demands of mission critical digital operations. Such ICT infrastructure concept, forming the blueprint of all current and future SmartCities, is able to excellently cater for Malta's knowl- edge-based sectors, such as financial services, business process outsourc- ing, digital gaming, digital media and so on, which depend on a robust ICT infrastructure to operate for an in- ternational clientele from Malta," Mr Tabone concluded. Information Technology Designing a Business Intelligence strategy ANDREA MUSCAT BUSINESS Intelligence has been on the agenda of most management teams as one of the high priority in- vestment areas for CIOs. For a BI project to be a success, an appropri- ate BI strategy needs to be in place. Such a strategy in itself is a critical success factor for a BI project. Unfortunately very few organiza- tions have a comprehensive BI strat- egy in place and this is due to the lack of alignment of IT with the business functions. More often than not, or- ganizations will dive straight into their architectural and technology needs without suitably considering their business needs, when in fact this is what business intelligence should be addressing. An organization can easily identify itself as one that is lacking a business intelligence strategy. If an organiza- tion's 'BI strategy' includes the tech- nology infrastructure or the IT de- partment asking the organizations' business functions what reports they need, one can easily pinpoint that the organization is taking the wrong ap- proach to building a BI strategy. Another indication that an organi- zation is taking the wrong approach with their BI strategy, is that one of the organization's first steps to imple- menting BI is building a data ware- house. These examples give an indi- cation of the mistakes organization's make when designing a BI strategy. When designing a BI strategy, the correct questions need to be asked. • Does the business have sufficient and reliable information to take quick, critical decisions? • Are we using information to identify and enable our strategic and competitive advantages? • What metrics should we use to measure implementation progress and the attainment of our BI goals? • What governance model should we use to drive our BI? • Which business decisions are we unable to take due to a lack of in- formation? • How should we redesign our applications and processes to achieve our BI goals? • Which toolsets will allow us to achieve our BI goals? One of the critical factors for a successful BI initiative is having an executive sponsor whose role is to champion the project, to pro- mote it across the organization and to be absolutely clear on the value it brings to the organization. The executive sponsor must be able to influence other executives as well as have their trust. This is a role for someone who would typically have bottom-line responsibility and cer- tainly not someone from the IT de- partment. Another critical success factor in building a BI strategy is the align- ment of BI technology with the busi- ness and not the other way around. It is imperative that the business is clear on what it is trying to achieve with a BI initiative, therefore align- ment with the business objectives as well as the business strategy is im- portant. Each group of stakeholders will have specific information require- ments and these requirements need to be well understood. BI leaders must identify the priorities of their BI strategy and try their best to keep them as transparent as pos- sible throughout the organization, making sure they are tied with the overall company objectives. The importance of putting to- gether a cross-organizational group, which includes employees from Business, IT and analytics, will be key to making the project a suc- cess. This group of people will be responsible for the overall strategic plan and developing the priorities. They will also be responsible of de- veloping the business requirements as well as implementing them. Such a group will also help the company interpret and give insight to any of the business decisions being taken. A BI strategy must also understand what users ultimately need. One can look at BI users at 3 different levels; strategic, tactical and operational. Strategic users take a few decisions, however each one will have a consid- erable weight on the business. Tacti- cal users make several decisions daily. They will most likely need informa- tion updates daily. Operational users need information to extract numbers from large numbers of transactions. Taking decisions on one's BI strate- gy will be greatly facilitated by under- standing who will use BI and for what reasons. This will reflect the type of information users would need, as well as how often they will need it. The points highlighted through- out this article are only some of the factors an organization must keep in mind when developing their BI strat- egy. The bottom line is that organiza- tions must have a BI strategy in place before embarking on a BI project. Without this, a BI project is bound to fail, resulting in a waste of resources, especially financial resources. Andrea Muscat is the Business Development Executive for Alert Solutions. Alert Solutions is the only VAR (Value Added Reseller) of SAP in Malta. Alert Solutions MENA FZE is a SAP GOLD VAR in the MENA region. FTIAS and Meeting Point Malta choose SmartCity Malta for their business operations