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With c-commerce causing a paradigm shift, surviving and managing the information flood will be a critical factor for enterprises to thrive and have a distinct competitive edge

The world is rapidly moving towards convergence and a new business and connection paradigm is emerging—c-commerce. Here, intellectual capital will move to the mainstream of enterprise assets. Technology and services for enterprise knowledge management will evolve to support the extended, collaborative enterprise. Surviving the information flood and effectively managing it will be a critical success factor for enterprises to survive and have a distinct competitive edge.

In a c-commerce business world, ‘knowledge and information’ will be the basis for giving an enterprise its competitive edge. This is where Business Intelligence (BI) comes in. But what is Business Intelligence? Currently, in India, BI as a concept is not clearly understood, typically being limited to either traditional data base analysis tool or mistaken for a concept similar to market intelligence.

In brief, BI solutions strive to manage the onslaught of data flood and eliminate ‘gut feel’ with empirical data analysis. It is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing and providing access to data to help enterprises make informed business decisions. Typically, BI applications include decision supporting systems, query and reporting, OLAP, statistical analysis, forecasting and data mining.

BI therefore is the foundation on which c-commerce rests. It offers focussed solutions for current front-end applications as CRM, SRM, Risk Management, EPM et.al. It is not a technical tool for tactical implementation but a strategic decision that makes sense of business data.

BI in the near future will be profoundly different from the way it is viewed today. According to Gartner, the Business Intelligence market has transformed significantly in 2002. New technologies have emerged and merged with existing ones, changing what the market thinks is BI and forcing vendors to deal with a different marketplace.

This is clearly reflected in the Frost & Sullivan report on the Business Intelligence market in India, wherein BI has been categorised to include query and reporting tools, data warehousing and mining technologies and business performance management. As per the report, the BI market is estimated at INR 26 crores for Jan-Dec 2001 and is expected to grow by 40-45% in 2002, i.e. approx INR 37.5 crores. This is an indication of an increasing level awareness of BI, even though implementation at a strategic level is yet to pick up.

At the outset, a majority of BI solutions has continued to be implemented on an "as needed" basis, and at a departmental level. And as enterprises continue to move toward risk aversion, it is evident that the vendor success in the last quarter of 2002 will be based on financial and product stability and service excellence. In keeping with the underlying market dynamics, BI market in 2002 has experienced a limited/flat growth with enterprises expecting more from their vendors than ever before. The result is a tough market in which consolidation is inevitable in the immediate future – one in which only the fittest will survive.

BI solutions are thus in an evolving market that has immense potential for growth, albeit slowly. Further, innovation has continued although at reduced levels. The key reason for this has been the blurred understanding by the target audience of the concept itself and its scope and benefits thereof. Compounding the problem has been the huge past investments made by these enterprises in enterprise applications with negligible return on investments.

Thus, the ‘wait and watch’ approach continues unabated—with enterprises in no mood to invest and deploy new applications as BI. So despite the temptation to rush to the "next greatest thing," most enterprises are continuing to focus on improving the use of the applications they already have.

Year 2002 has marked the beginning of the age of BI. Going forward, failure to begin leveraging the growth in analytic capabilities will place them at a competitive disadvantage – a situation that will make the difference in survival in a world gradually but surely moving towards
e-commerce.