Decision making is now more of a science and BI is an essential tool that supports this science

Businesses and managers have come around to appreciate the need to use information and analysis to make better decisions in their movement from tactical to strategic management styles. Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the tools that has enabled this movement. To understand more about this, Dataquest spoke to Satyakam Mohanty, Director and CEO, Ma Foi Analytics. Excerpts

What are the growing needs for business intelligence?

Businesses today have much lesser elbow room than ever before, leave alone having the luxury of space for errors in their business models. What hence differentiates and saves a business the risk of losing its spot to the next one in line, is the ability to make better and informed decisions for itself and its stakeholders including the customer. Businesses and Managers have come around to appreciate the need to use information and analysis to make better decisions in their movement from tactical to strategic management styles.

Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the tools that has enabled this movement and there is an increasing need for this tool to empower managers to look into the future of their businesses, wherein the questions are more about what is coming their way rather than looking back at what has gone past them. There is lesser and lesser of postmortem and even lesser crystal balling and stargazing in boardrooms now. Decision making is now more of a science and less of an art and BI is an essential tool that supports this science. A highly networked data infrastructure, disparate sources of information, flooded social media and collaborative intelligence is what welcomes and challenges the millennial manager and the need and relevance of BI is at its highest point than ever before.

In what ways can analytics help bring change?

With the deluge of data available today, organizations and governments are presented with a unique opportunity to utilize this information for better decision making. The use of analytics enables organizations to generate meaningful insights for smarter decisions, thus driving business outcomes. However, a majority of organizations don't have the capability or the organizational bandwidth to successfully integrate analytics into their operations.

Instances where analytics has been innovatively used include the Obama campaign in the US. Also, a lot of financial services have started using analytics to develop comprehensive customer profiles.

The use of analytics has empowered organizations in many ways. These include:

• Ability to better predict customer events, enabling organizations to operate in a proactive mode
• Reduce the cycle time from insights to actions, processing real time data for improved business outcomes
• Improve data transparency throughout an organization, making the data easy-to-access and store
• Helps to develop customized products and services, providing a competitive edge
• Optimize production processes, resulting in minimization of operating expenses
• Allows for flexible, iterative and responsive business decisions, enabling business managers to integrate data to make sound decisions

As technology continues to evolve at an accelerating pace, new opportunities are available for business organizations to harness the power of analytics to develop a sustainable competitive edge.

 

How technology can be used by small and medium businesses to leverage it to their advantage?

The Enterprise IT Value Chain has a wide array of items from a basic domain name for a business all the way up to fully integrated Business Intelligence systems with predictive and intuitive capabilities. Interestingly no part of this value chain is today reserved for the ‘big boys' or the ‘new kid in the block'. New and revolutionary IT models and solution frameworks have made technology most accessible and affordable for businesses of all sizes irrespective of their stage of growth. With the accessibility puzzle solved, the question of leveraging technology is best answered by the statement that a technology is only as good as the person who uses it. On a similar tone, technology can only do so much so well as much as the business wants it and demands it to do. The question hence is about how much and how bad do SMEs want technology to work for them. There is no shying away today in the name of budgets or mindspace for any business and most businesses invest to find their rhythm with riding on technology. SMEs can adopt and leverage technology to their advantage by first understanding what the Enterprise IT value chain has to offer them and adopt pieces that cater to the Communication aspects first and then move on to collaborative and integrating tools relevant to their business process. A simple walkthrough would begin from a basic website and email domain to get their business noticed, and move on to interactive two-way portals that bring the customer and the delivery team closer on a CRM framework, and then move up to integrated enterprise level resource and project management systems. The topping is the management reporting dashboard that covers all aspects of technology deployed and simple dashboards pave the way for advance and intuitive Business Intelligence systems that will put a business ahead of its competition. Technology has kept pace with the fast growing prominence of SMEs in the market space by creating low and zero-cost technology solutions for even some of the complex processes like Supply Chain Management and ERP systems, to invite and encourage the budget conscious SME to embrace technology much earlier in their evolution than what they would have otherwise planned for.

What are the ways to sustain growth in the e-commerce business?

E-commerce industry is currently in the "Survive" phase. Almost all e-commerce industry players, including the major ones such as Flipkart and Snapdeal, have resorted to offering discounts on a regular basis. With the intense competition and depleting margins prevailing in this industry, players in this space are forced to continuously innovate to merely survive.

In addition to this, some other challenges faced by the players of this industry are:

• Maintaining customer relations and sustaining them
• Coping up with the growing demand of mobility
• Practicing a lean customer procurement methodology
• Understanding and utilizing the data available

With so much of uncertainty and competition, e-commerce businesses would have to strive to get a competitive edge. Some strategies that might prove to be helpful are:

• Focus on mobility: Apart from making investments towards development of an optimized web store, it is becoming equally critical to offer mobile solutions for customers to enhance their shopping convenience.

• Utilize the power of big-data: Most e-commerce companies focus only on structured data. Leveraging the power of both structured and unstructured data to make decisions could enhance the business outcomes.

• Rely on multiple sources for customer leads: Availability of multiple sources of customer leads would improve the chances for new customer acquisition. Email marketing, Reddit's Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Yahoo Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Merchant etc. can prove to be helpful

Each e-commerce business entity is unique and therefore, the combination of sustainability levers that a particular e-commerce entity needs to adopt varies.

What trend surfaces up for customer engagement solutions on analysis of online consumer purchase behaviour and big data analytics?

Nowadays, there are numerous customer engagement solutions available in market but most of them don't score really high on the effectiveness scale. Some customer engagement solution capabilities which are emerging out to be critical include:

• Ability to build and update data: Each mouse click adds to the information related to a visitor's preference, behavior and identity. Thus, a good engagement tool should have the capability to continuously build and update data on consumer purchase behavior. This data should be gathered from multiple sources and then get aggregated in a single consumer-related information repository

• Ability to provide actionable insights: Analysis of consumer purchase behavior data helps in outlining the relationships among brands, channels, and customers. Such information can help in improving engagement initiatives and taking better strategic business decisions

• Targeted messages at the right time: It is very critical for a customer engagement solution to share customized messages (with customers) at the right time. It is very important for the procedure underlying the development of tailored messages to be robust in nature. One way to boost the robustness is through the effective use of big-data analytics

• Capacity to offer scalability and responsiveness: A customer engagement solution should have the capability to track consumers even when they switch their access channels in real-time. The ability to still respond appropriately is possible only through the integration and effective analysis of voluminous consumer purchase behavior data across channels.