Brief

Are Indian enterprises ready for BI?

In an era where storage requirements are shooting through the roof, organisations have to look beyond effective data storage and extract intelligence from stored data. Information overload is becoming a huge concern for businesses. In such a scenario, Business Intelligence (BI) looks like a logical saviour. But is BI an effective concept and are Indian organisations ready for it? These were some of the concerns raised by CIOs at an interactive event “Enterprise Intelligence Platform-The backbone for BI” held by Express Computer and SAS India on December 8, 2004.

The panel had a mix of IT heads from industry verticals and industry analysts. The panellists spoke about their experiences with BI. Panel members were Anil Nadkarni (head, IT Thomas Cook), L Sundarajjan (senior vice president, Corporate Information Technology, Aditya Birla Management Corporation), R P Singh (executive director, Integrated Information Systems, BPCL), Alok Shende (head, IT Practices, Frost and Sullivan) and Phillip Beniac of SAS. The session was moderated by Val Souza, Consulting Editor of Express Computer. Delivering the keynote, Jim Davis, senior VP and chief marketing officer, SAS Institute spoke about BI’s relevance for Indian enterprises. Anil Nadkarni of Thomas Cook spoke about the importance of accurate data capture for effective BI analysis. R P Singh, executive director, integrated information systems, BPCL illustrated the immense benefits his organisation gained by deploying BI tools that let it gauge the extent to which its employees flew across the country. So high was the usage that the company managed to negotiate a 5 percent discount from the concerned airlines. This alone helped rapidly recover the cost of deploying BI tools.

“As data gets standardised and evaluated for its quality, BI can prove to be crucial in extracting intelligence,” said Alok Shende, head, IT Practices, Frost and Sullivan.

Sushma Naik