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The wired world will soon give way to a wireless one. The era of physical connectivity  will see a growing focus on service-oriented application integration standards and architectures. The world will increasingly realise the importance of embedded computing power in every day objects, In a harsh environment, any organism will adapt and evolve ...eventually. But modern business demands a high rate of evolution. Traditional strategies for gaining marketshare and growing revenue are no longer sufficient. In markets where new products and services can be copied within days,  experience will be the differentiator. And being able to draw on that experience using a business intelligence framework will be the key to survival. This is what will differentiate an intelligent enterprise from rest of the pack.

What is Business Intelligence?
In a scenario where there is little margin for error, it is critical that enterprises have the ability to quickly align and economically grow their technologies to meet the challenges of the marketplace. The business needs to be smarter in allocating resources and attracting customers to attain its profit targets, while maintaining low risk. One thing that can help the business do just this is the implementation of technologies aligned to business needs.
   Typically, business users and decision makers have a hard time finding the information at the right time to meet their needs. The information exists, but one needs to access the information. This is where business intelligence (BI) comes into play.
  What exactly is BI? It is about using accumulated information to create new knowledge and to respond to the challenges of business environment. It is about turning raw data into knowledge that   helps  make  informed

decisions. BI is, therefore, an integrated solution that provides for a market-leading data warehouse solution to create and deliver high quality, consistent, and accurate information. It allows analysts to provide insights and knowledge about the enterprise based on past, current and forecasted information. Finally ; it is the market leading business intelligence framework to exploit and deliver the information online at the right time and in the appropriate format to enable responsive informed decisions. It is a key component of an end-to-end intelligence creation and delivery process.

The Intelligence Value Chain (IVC) To understand BI in its entirety we must understand its role in the Intelligence Value Chain (IVC). The IVC articulates the key components of the Intelligence Architecture. The first step of the IVC is the development of an action plan. This considers how to achieve the defined business objective and how existing informational and technology infrastructures can be leveraged along with expected benefits.

The second step is extracting, transforming and storing the important data gathered. By focusing on specific business objectives, one can identify what is needed and what isn't. Data that adds value is cleansed, integrated, consolidated and transformed into a useful reliable source.

The third step is Intelligence Storage. The creation of intelligence from massive quantities of data requires flexible storage architecture. Different types of intelligence creation requires structures that are different from classic databases- relational for present, multidimensional for comparison, tables for analysis and predication.

The fourth step is BI. It becomes a key component of an end-to-end intelligence creation and delivery process. BI encompasses financial management solutions, risk solutions comprising credit, market and operational risk, and finally CRM solutions.

Financial Management Solutions:
Let's consider the issues at hand for a chief financial officer. Consistency and reliability of information is of foremost importance today. Finance executives are challenged with predicting, analysing, and reporting performance in a turbulent and constantly changing global economy. Speed, quality, and integration of data are paramount to staying ahead in business.

In addition, there is a need for traditional financial measures, such a income statements and balance sheets, to be combined with the value and profitability of an organisation's customer, products and services, supplier relationships, and employees. There is a need to get an overall balanced view of the business. This is where BI comes in to play.

The Financial Management Solution provides the CFO a single window with a built-in financial intelligence to address the entire spectrum of analytic needs like budgeting and planning, financial forecasting, reporting, analysis, and cost management. It allows the CFO to grow from being a pure policing entity to becoming a partner in the organisation allowing him to priorities his areas of focus. It gives the CFO the means to provide accurate revenue and profit guidance, combining the judgment and experience of operating mangers with scientific techniques, centralising the flow of information.

Risk Management Solutions:
Market risk is defined as the risk of loss in a value of a portfolio of instruments that is caused by adverse movements in financial markets. Currently, there is a need to be able to quickly and accurately create risk measurement for senior level management and the trading organisation, Existing systems range from spreadsheets to other risk management products that are not flexible and

extensible enough for an enteprise-wide risk management solution. Further, because the data respositories are very large and disparate, the biggest challenge is bringing together of transitioning from exisiting systems into a single, enterprise-wide solution.

The risk management solution analyses the data that mark the firm-wide position to market, thus creating the base case for risk analysis. Marketing to market is the process of revaluing the existing portfolio using the current prices, rates, and factoring in risk variables. This is a base case or "current state of the world". Then stochastic processes are used to create additional market scenarios. These scenarios are " future state of the world ". The firm-wide portfolio is re-valued at each new scenario.The difference between the base case, mark to market valuation, and the scenario valuation is the basis to arrive at a single measure of the risk. Similarly, for credit risk, defined as the loss in value or cost of replacement if a " counter party " in a derivaties transaction has a change in credit ratings or fails to meet their obligation as a "counter party"- risk management performs current and potential exposure(s) and can be configured to support various credit metrics to arrive at an enterprise wide risk measure.

Combined with the projected cash-flow statement, basis results derived from FMS, which are updated on the basis of rolling forecasts can provide a sound basis for dynamically managing the market and credit risk.

Operational risk management is an evolving concept. It is defined as risk of expected or unexpected losses due to process, people, systems failure or inadequacy and external events. The intelligence gathered from the operational risk solution becomes an input for the financial management solution. This ensures reorganisation of  expenses that may come into play to match the associated costs elements specific to operational risk and the reqired capital cushion. The dricing forces for operational, markets, and credit risk management include a regulatory push, a focus on the enterprise-wide risk management framework, commitment from the top management and recent repeated occurrences of high loss event.

Thus,by leveraging financial management and risk management solutions, management can acurately forecast the company's performance.

Customer Relationship Management :
In India Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is perceived as purely operational i.e. capturing data from all customers touch points like the web, call centres, direct mail compaigns, etc, and investgation at a transactional level. The missing piece is Analytical CRM.

Analytical CRM involes analysis of data gathered by operational CRM systems for comprehending business performance parameter like customer risk, customer profitability, lifetime value, behaviour, attrition, and more.This is 360 degree CRM that allows the enterprise to gain not only valuable insights into the best marketing stratigies for success, but also the capability to identify profitable customers, potentially profitable customers, customers likely to leave, as well as new customer opportunities. Through the deployment of  analytics enterprise can create customer segments and profiles, determine the appropriate content and improve the successes in remaining and improving profitable customer relationship at all touch points.

The Intelligent Enterprise :
There is no doubt B1 has increased in importance as enterprises recongise the need to snap out of the paralysing condition known as "infoglut" - an overwhelming information and data overload.Infoglut results from a mismatch between an enterprise's ability to acqiure and collect information and it's ability to read , understand, and digest data, to make stratigic business decisions across the enterprise.Statistics show that over 80 percent of organisational data remains unused !

A majority of enterprises are faced with the daunting task of sychronising the dynamic external and internal environment to sustain and increase profitability, fight increasing competitive pressure, manage infoglut, decrease the widening gap between the infoglut and data anaysed, and drives decisions on the intelligence gained from analytics - all at once.

Analytics will inevitably gain increasing importance. This will be driven by the exponential growth of data, fuelled by new customer and supplier interaction platforms such as internet, call centres, interactive TV, and mobiles devices. What will be of paramount importance is the decrease in gap between infoglut and analysed. It will be equally imperative to act on the insights gained from data analysed. Given the current trend, it is possible that these gaps may widen. If so, this will endanger the company's position to maintain it's agility.

A company that adopts B1 carely on is in a better position to succesed in the future than a company, which either implements  B1 late in the game or not at all.Thus is because technology will be more adept at dealing with business problems than humans. In this enviornment, the intelligent Enterprise will survive. Information flow will be real time and centralised. The enterprise will not only manage information effieciently, but will act on the insight provided by data analysed from both extenal and internal sources.It will performs analyses from unstructed data sources. It will have advanced analytics ranging from financial forecasting to risk management and customer management.

To be an intelligent enterprise, a company needs a solid business intelligence platforms - driven by analytical applications - that it can be used to base its projection and strategies. Without it, management teams are forced to make best guesses based on subjective information, hunches.

To quote Warren Buffet : "To finish first, you have to first finish." Are you an Intelligent Enterprise ?