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'BI has become a boardroom application'

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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