BI for All

From a decision making tool for the CEO to a business enabler

for the store in-charge, that's the dream business intelligence (BI) has for

you. Even though all-pervasive BI is yet to become mainstream, the undercurrents

of the way business dynamics and competitive pressures are pushing BI are

already visible. Gradually percolating down the line, BI is slated to eventually

pervade the entire value chain of the enterprise including its partners. As

operational BI emerges as the next frontier in business intelligence, it's in

turn driving the key movement towards real time BI.

The Evolution



Highlighting the evolution of BI, Kaushik Bagchi, country leader,
Information Management Software, IBM India, explains that the first phase of

traditional data warehousing efforts were focused on query and reporting to

understand what happened, the second wave focused on technologies like online

analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining for historical analysis to

understand why and recommend future action-strategic and tactical planning-and

the third generation of solutions are focusing on the front line workers, and

providing them with increased business insight within the context of the

business processes in which they are involved to drive real time action. This

means enabling call center agents to better service customers and identify cross

sell opportunities while they are engaged with them on the phone, enabling

detectives to leverage real time information to identify potential suspects

before they arrive at the scene of a crime, and improving sales efficiencies by

leveraging information to optimize point of sale activities.

As Venkatesh Anant, director, Business Development, Intellicus,

says "Operational BI is taking over the archaic BI architecture. An

increasing number of organizations are looking at leveraging BI inputs to make

strategic decisions as well as monitor day-to-day functions of the company. In

the past many companies kept BI applications locked away inside IT departments

or in the hands of business analysts." According to Sudipta K Sen, CEO and

MD, SAS Institute India, "Today's BI solutions span the entire breadth of

a company-from the supply side to the customer side and everything in between.

BI is now trying to reach every functional area within an organization."

Bagchi points out that BI will evolve from opportunistic

deployments to more pervasive and enterprise-wide applications used to drive

business transformations from strategic to the process level. This way the

organization would gain insights into understanding where and how value is

created in the business and will be able to respond more quickly to business

changes and opportunities.

Driving Factors



CIOs, in effect, are braving to take the leap of faith and have started looking
at enterprise BI rather than holding BI in the hands of select few to improve

business process and efficiencies. Warranting there are competitive pressures

that are demanding companies to react faster to changing business conditions and

customer requirements. This requires the need to optimize business operations on

a daily basis and, in some cases, even facilitate decision making at least at

the functional level (if not the corporate-wide level) on a daily basis.

According to Santanu Ghose, country manager for the NonStop

Server business at Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales, the services

industry, specifically, is seeing the emergence of areas like online logistics

management, e-Procurement, call centers, etc, and there is lot of interaction

with the end customer and partners on a 24x7 basis. "Considering the fact

that businesses are now operating on a 24x7 basis, the strategic, historical

perspective trend is not enough. The requirement is arising for more current

information and data analytics based on which real-time decisions can be

taken," he says.

"BI will evolve to drive business transformations from strategic to the process level"		"Today's BI solutions span the entire breadth of a company-from the supply side to the customer side and everything in between"		"Operational BI is taking over the archaic BI architecture, where BI was kept locked away inside IT departments"
-Kaushik Bagchi, country leader, Information Management Software, IBM India		-Sudipta K Sen, CEO and MD, SAS Institute India		-Venkatesh Anant, director, Business Development, Intellicus

In addition to this, some aspect of day-to-day decision-making

is also going to percolate right down to the operational staff, such as the call

center agent, as the world over one sees the advent of the operational aspect of

handling customers. This, in turn, is driving the need for BI for all. As

Soumendra Mohanty, lead, Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Practice,

Accenture India, says, "If companies really want to compete on analytics

they have to accept operational BI and predictive analytics to the core, it

should become a culture of companies rather than another application or system

providing few reports and data points." Says Dr Kaustubh Chokshi, CEO and

co-founder, Intelligent Business Systems for true competitive advantage, BI must

percolate to every level.

Down the Line



But is BI geared to cater down the line? If implemented the right way, BI
has the capability to move beyond the traditional decision support system for

the top management and cater to the unique requirements further down the line.

Starting from customer behavior at a transactional level, as it happens to

making strategic decisions on where the next mega store needs to open, all is

driven by analyzing huge data. Dashboards, alerts, event driven analytics,

predictive modeling etc gives a distinct advantage to companies at each level of

operation and can cater to KPIs targeted at operational level right up to the

strategic level.

According to SPS Grover, enterprises will be moving towards BI

not only for their employees but for the entire value chain including partners.

This kind of pervasiveness, he feels, will especially gain momentum in the

services industries like BFSI, telecom, IT Services, BPO, etc.

"BI should become a culture, rather than another application or system providing a few reports and data points"		"For true competitive advantage, BI must percolate to every level"
-Soumendra Mohanty, lead, Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Practice, Accenture India		-Kaustubh Chokshi, CEO and co founder, Intelligent Business Systems, Accenture India

According to Dr Srinivasa Raghava Vegi, practice head,

e-Enabling & Data Warehousing at Wipro Infotech, the BI market in India has

definitely addressed the top management requirements, but it's making a

complete enterprise BI ready that's challenging. According to Bhavish Sood,

Principal Analyst, at react from Gartner one of the typical hurdles in the

Indian market is that many enterprises end up having the same set of reporting

for different levels and functionalities. "The levels of maturity and the

analytical needs at the various levels differ. The BI solution should be able to

factor in and address these different analytical needs," he adds.

As a result, the BI system needs to be designed in a manner that

it is not limited to a particular segment of management and the interfaces are

tailored for each user's needs. Rajiv Gupta, DSS, Consumer Retail, Reliance

Industries, cites the example of his company wherein the BI systems designed are

not limited to a particular segment of management. "The trick is to

differentiate in their needs. While top management requires mainly financial

KPIs, exception reports, highly optimized one pagers, the middle management

requires the power to analyse, power to drill down and dissect information, and

collaborate with their peers. On the other hand, the operating people would

require canned reports and would be better served by broadcasting predefined

information via emails, SMS etc," he adds. According to Sood, therefore,

the first need while designing the BI strategy is to build a portfolio of what

are the various analytical needs of the different functions and levels in the

organization.

The approach in implementing a pervasive enterprise-wide BI may

also differ across industries, and also depend on the size of the enterprise. Dr

Vegi explains that BI across organizations has gone beyond being a 6-12 months

initiative to a three year or in large cases even a five-year roadmap.

"This also reflects that the enterprises have realized that BI is an

important asset in fighting competition rather than being just a technology

enabler," he adds.

"Enterprises will be moving towards BI not only for their employees but for the entire value chain, including partners"		"As businesses are now operating on a 24x7 basis, historical perspective is not enough. The requirement is for more current information and data analytics"
-SPS Grover, VP, Sales, Oracle India		-Santanu Ghose, country manager for the NonStop Server business at Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales

Now, More Predictive



The trend towards real time BI is moving parallel to the pervasiveness
factor. According to Grover, the nature of businesses today is changing and

becoming more dynamic, requiring BI to move towards becoming more real-time.

"Highly competitive and dynamic organizations demand that the information

is available sooner than later, the data latency has to be also very less. More

and more scenarios demand that the BI systems are current," says Gupta.

Tied in with the movement towards real time BI is the gradual

transition from reactive to predictive analytics. Till about two to three years

back much of the focus was on querying and reporting and on "what happened

and what actions are needed" level of reporting. A lot of the values

derived from traditional DW and BI is still revolving in the area of 'what

happened'. However, as the businesses are maturing over a period of time and

enough data is being gathered, much of the focus is now going to be on using the

data for doing predictive analysis that will support proactive decision-making.

BI is slowly graduated to predictive modeling and optimization levels delivering

functions like "what will happen next, what is the best that can

happen" and help companies influence the outcome. According to Anant, the

BI requirements have now evolved into requirements that are meant for largely

moving just from data churning to proactive decision-making by a group. Today's

BI is meant to make users and organizations take intelligent decisions, and not

just get the ability to summarize data into reports. BI tools and output formats

are increasingly enabling people to take proactive decisions on various

operational and business parameters. According to Suganthi Shivkumar, MD,

Hyperion Solutions, business users are also increasingly demanding more from

their BI tools. Non-technical users want to easily analyze profitability, apply

predictive statistical models to historical data sets to identify trends,

clusters, and outliners, and so on. In other words, they expect BI to produce

strategic, future-oriented information versus simply rendering summarized,

historical data.

The advantages, as Sen points out; Business analytics which

delivers predictive foresight, not just hindsight is a key differentiator, as it

can offer intelligence to organizations in areas of forecasting, scenario

planning, optimization and data mining. These analytic capabilities, along with

data management and query-and reporting technologies, solve key business pains,

such as misalignment within the organization, lack of customer knowledge and

slow response rates to market shifts.

Ultimately, as Mohanty points out, marrying real time analytics

with historical perspective will be a distinct advantage that any company

would like to have-call centers, customer retention, sales, marketing, fraud

detection, all these will require a real time decision making ability and that

is where operational BI will play a larger than life part. Users and

organizations have started to demand BI solutions that will allow them to do

both, traditional query and reporting as well as advanced analytics. Together,

this combination will empower users to better understand and analyze what has

happened in the past, bridge that with the present, and then use this

intelligence to prepare and anticipate for the future.

Shipra Malhotra



shipram@cybermedia.co.in