News

Press Center SAS in the News The Economic TimesBusiness India Business Today Business Standard The Financial Express The Times Of India The Hindu Hindu Business Line Dataquest India Infoline Ciol My Iris Sify News Domain-B CXOtoday Archives sas com

Archives

So what’s the realm of BI? It is a key component of the intelligence value chain (IVC), an end-to-end intelligence creation and delivery foundation that transforms raw data into actionable intelligence that can be used to improve all aspects of business. IVC has five key foundation blocks:

* Business Intelligence: This involves information dissemination, to all the information consumers within an organization via several channels like the Web so that they are empowered with real-time information, interactive querying and dynamic reporting capabilities to make decisions based on actionable intelligence. Using an information delivery portal, organizations can have a single focal point that leverages a centrally-managed enterprise directory that can be used to seamlessly access information from various systems and servers throughout the enterprise.

* Planning: This assessment helps crystallize and prioritize defined business objectives of the enterprise in line with the BI solution to be implemented. During this phase, information and technology infrastructures are leveraged to jointly define derivable returns on investment. Industry standard data models and methodologies have an important role to play here.

* ETLQ: This involves extracting (E), transforming (T) and loading (L) data from all sources within the enterprise. Data cleansing to ensure superior data quality and data integrity is the critical success factor for BI implementation.

* Intelligent Storage: Lever-aging current infrastructure, this involves creation of a flexible storage architecture that is scalable, robust and can easily accommodate changes in technology platforms, addition of new databases etc.

* Analytical Intelligence: This typically involves the use of predictive modeling, forecasting and descriptive modeling techniques to create previously unknown intelligence that provides competitive advantage. Analytical Intelligence adapts to a company’s growing business while distilling vast quantities of complex data into key insights and effective business strategies.

Let’s understand how this works across industries while providing opportunities for significant growth in these sectors, both in India and globally. Undoubtedly, financial services and telecommunication companies have been the early adopters of BI solutions. Thus, a financial services organization can use BI to effectively comply with the Basel II guidelines that lay emphasis on credit, market and operations risk. They can also use anti-money laundering solutions to comply with the Money Laundering Act 2003 by detecting and reporting on laundering of monies carried through serious crimes or criminal offences across transactions. For managing and reinforcing customer relationship management (CRM) especially in the fiercely competitive retail banking space, various BI solutions like marketing automation, analytical CRM, marketing optimization and interaction management allow for customer profiling and segmentation, planning, execution and monitoring of targeted multi-channel marketing campaigns, optimizing channel efficiencies etc.

Similarly, telecommunication industries can leverage BI solutions to optimize tariff plans, increase focus on customer retention, optimize network planning and capacity, assess creditworthiness of customers to enhance credit limits, analyze, validate and monitor network fraud.

A huge potential lies in the manufacturing industry as well. Manufacturing organizations can strategically use supply chain intelligence to anticipate customer demand, improve supplier strategies, set optimal pricing and policies, and identify actions that achieve targeted customer and quality service levels while keeping warranty costs at the minimum.

Retail is another sector that is currently emerging in India and can put BI solutions to use to ascertain customer profitability, merchandise profitability and promotion profitability.

Further, BPO (business process outsourcing) firms that have been instrumental in fuelling the overall economic growth in the country provide a variety of services to their customers including data analysis. The BPO market has touched $2.3 billion in India and global outsourcing spending is projected to top $1.2 trillion by the end of 2003. Organizations that carry out business services provisioning, ie provide value-added services through a combination of business understanding, technology-enabled frameworks and intelligent data analysis, can use BI solutions to meet various analytical requirements.

BI in India is ready for exponential growth but has to overcome certain restraining factors — blurred understanding of the concept itself and the ambiguity pertinent to returns on investments (ROI) generated. This is despite the fact that BI solutions are known to generate ROIs typically in the range of 50-200 per cent soon after successful deployment.

Gartner has estimated the worldwide BI market to touch $2.3 billion by 2005. However, the BI market in India is still in a nascent stage and this is clearly evident from the recent Frost & Sullivan Report, 2001-2008, which estimated the BI market in India to touch $15.5 million by the end of 2003 and is growing at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.9 per cent.

Thus, a final analysis reveals that the key engine of growth for the BI market is exploding information databases wherein companies need to unleash the potential of the vast amounts of data being generated across their customer, supplier and organizational chains to gain true enterprise intelligence and more importantly competitive advantage.