Business Intelligence (BI) is all about data management to get a strategic
insight to improve business and productivity. Though most enterprises already
have a BI infrastructure in place, many enterprises are also moving toward the
next step in the evolution of BI and adopting new technologies and approaches
like verticalization. Sudeep Nadkarni, Global Practice Leader, Kanbay talks with
Minu Sirsalewala of Dataquest about trends in BI, especially in the BFSI, and
the rise of the managed services model of delivery
How would you describe the present phase of BI?
BI has evolved over the few years and very high-end innovation is happening
around it. It is not a mere analytical tool or technology, but is a process,
which has the capacity to execute some very complex data and provide a
meaningful insight to the same.
There's no one project, which will immediately make your
company intelligent. It's more like a series of distinct projects that
synergistically combine to give you fresh, valuable insights.
There has been an increased vertical focus and
specialization from BI providers. How has this worked?
BI is all about data management and providing strategic insight. The
spectrum of BI includes process-tools-technology. Today BI has moved on to
become a boardroom application from a mere enabling tool in the business
process. Especially, in the Banking and Finance sector, BI applications are
getting verticalized.
There has been an increased trend in clients becoming more
aware to their specific requirements. They are asking for domain based solutions
and not just tools or technology to apply BI. There is a specific requirement
from the client to understand the domain processes and have BI solutions
designed on the basis of these processes.
The way businesses are, marketing and financial
applications are changing. There is an extensive cross selling within the BFSI
segment, which needs high intelligence applications. For example, retail bankers
looking at insurance, for this they need BI processes, which would enable them
to make these sale pitches to the right target audience. BI from a mere report
and data provider has evolved to a complex level of providing business
opportunities and decisions.
Indian market specifically is becoming industry specific
and as a result verticalization has increased. Today the trend has come to where
enterprises are creating chief data officer to manage the indispensable data
base asset. Data warehousing has become a non-performance asset.
Which are some of the more popular solutions and why?
Service bureau model is rapidly gaining importance. Organizations are now
looking at BI as a managed service and not just as a product purchased from the
market. Services companies like Kanbay, develop and customize solutions on basic
BI tools to give a service to the client. The service could be a one-time
developed solution or an ongoing process where the complete service delivery is
the responsibility of the service provider. And these services are bound by SLAs.
Under fraud analytics, anti-money laundering solutions for
banking, predictive M&A modeler solutions for the investment banks,
actuarial analytics solution for the insurance industry and data factory model
of delivery for cross industry clients are rapidly catching up.
What does 2006 have in store?
Expansion of BI deployments is the focus of many joint IT-businesses
initiatives as they further try to tap the vast volumes of data they have
accumulated in their ERP systems and data warehouses over the last decade.
The first generation of deployments focused on business
power users, who wanted intelligent reports to take meaningful decisions. This
next BI generation is trying to meet businesses' need to disseminate information
to all types of business users in their enterprise. Expanding the web of
business people, who can access and analyze this data that will help them
improve and even grow their business.
BI standardization and single vendor sourcing for
all-there is a need from customers to have an end-to-end solutions working on
standardized platforms so that integration in a heterogeneous environment is
possible.
A significant factor for standardization is to reduce
costs. This is accomplished through better software licensing deals, potential
hardware consolidation, reducing development, and maintenance costs. The demand
today is for people who have process expertise and not just expertise in tools
and technology.
Standardization also enables IT to become more responsive
to business needs by focusing on a standard set of BI tools rather than
developing and deploying with overlapping, redundant tools. This result is from
shifting time from being tools focused to working more closely with the
business.
Corporate performance measurement (CPM) systems will
continue to be at the top for BI vendor as well as major consulting firms. CPM
systems offer business solutions oriented to specific business functions
(finance or marketing, for example) or to specific business applications such as
fraud detection in insurance claims. The CPM offerings bundled with pre-built
analytics; reports, data models, and the Extract, transform and load (ETL)
populate the data from various source systems. This bundle is very appealing,
especially to businesses that feel they have not really exploited their
corporate data into useful business information.