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Business Intelligence and the CIO

BI is gradually becoming a part of every business process. While CIOs are optimistic about its benefits they would like some changes, writes Neeraj Gandhi

True to its name, Business Intelligence (BI) has, and is essentially helping enterprises to conduct business intelligently. Having analyzed the value addition that BI makes to the overall business, enterprises have started taking it seriously. Large businesses and conglomerates are investing heavily in BI as a lot of data generated through their legacy systems needs to be used to take important strategic growth decisions.

If we look at the scenario today, BI has touched the heart of the business process in verticals such as BFSI, telecom, IT/ ITeS, and manufacturing. It is estimated that companies in the manufacturing, government and pharmaceuticals space are expected to increase their BI spending.

According to Frost and Sullivan, the BI market in India in 2006 was worth $68.6 million, a good 30.0% growth over the previous year. It is expected to reach around $270 million by 2013, exhibiting a CAGR of 21.8 %. “BI market growth can be attributed to an increase in demand for analytics applications across verticals. Merger and acquisitions and adoptions of BI by small and medium businesses have also contributed to the growth rate,” said Sourabh Kaushal, Industry Manager, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia & Middle East.

Leveraging BI

Enterprises today are struggling to find solutions to manage their ever-increasing data. An even bigger challenge is extracting critical information from this jumbled heap to assist decision-making in the modern business. In such a scenario, CIOs have resorted to BI. “Data is lying scattered in various formats and the reports are available only on a monthly basis, which according to me is too late to take corrective or proactive action. Hence, BI becomes the obvious choice,” said Zoeb Adenwala, CIO, Essel Propack.

“Day by day the business is becoming increasingly complex. A sound management principle demands that decisions be made based on facts and figures. This generates requirement of reports for management and other users. With changing requirement for reports, same reports various views, various formats etc., BI is the obvious solution,” added Prasad Bapat, VP–Technology, Asit C Mehta Investment Intermediates Ltd.

While at Essel Propack BI has been targeted at sales, finance and production, it is being used extensively in all areas of business including risk management at Asit C Mehta. After having deployed BI and integrating it with business processes, both organizations have been successful in supporting proactive decision-making, saving user time to the tune of 90 minutes per day in searching for data and end users at these organizations are now in a better position to view and analyze data.

“BI gives business users the power to define and generate ad hoc reports with an intuitive, highly interactive and user friendly interface. Organizations can plan, execute, collaborate, and publish secured data and do not have to rely on the spreadsheet numbers. BI helps an organization gain a single view of the data coming from all of its application, and helps it exploit data in time and helps avoid the gap between data and usable information,” said Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence.

Elbee Express is looking at BI as a tool that frees its users and enables them to use information at will and in their own way.

The deployment has already started on the sales and operations side and the company intends to take BI to the finance and accounting system in the later stages of the deployment.

“Traditionally the IT function developed reports which were planned, and the user had hardly any freedom to do what he had in mind. This has been our primary motive behind opting for a BI tool. The tool would help the user gain access to analyzed information, predictions and permit him to compare data with historical records. Another reason is to reduce the dependence on IT,” said Shirish Gariba, CIO, Elbee Express.

BI leading the way

A lot has been talked about BI and its benefits. India though has been slightly late in leveraging the same, but the market seems to be growing every year. The bigger question is whether BI is living up to the expectations that it has managed to engender. Do CIOs view BI as a breakthrough technology?

For enterprises which are already leveraging BI, such as Asit C Mehta, BI is certainly playing a major role. “We are into the service industry where data is key in giving satisfactory and timely service to clients. BI would play a differentiating role,” said Bapat.

“BI reduces the load on the IT team to support business needs for various reports. One will have to conduct cost benefit analysis to justify expenditure on BI. At times it would be difficult to quantify business benefits in tangible measures. Looking at future, I feel it is not an option but a sure way forward,” he added.

The story is quite similar at Essel Propack. “Traditional reports only give transactional information like sales figures or inventory costs etc. BI tools extracts intelligence from the data by analyzing trends and patterns all of which helps in decision making,” said Adenwala. BI tops the IT priority list here, and Adenwala believes that it is a low hanging fruit which can immediately give a huge business benefit in short span of time. “For any business to grow, the senior and middle management must have good data and tools to analyze and plan their strategies,” he added.

Even for enterprises that are looking at BI as a differentiator, the sentiment is quite similar. At Elbee for instance, where the element of freedom in an integral part of the business, BI is seen as a leap ahead. Gariba said, “Any tool which frees the user and empowers him is a breakthrough one. BI helps them understand their domain, technology, and enables them to analyze. If they are behind their targets or goals, they can align and correct the same and if they have achieved they can go for more.”

CIOs’ Take

So, can it be concluded that BI, the way it is being packaged and offered presently, is a breakthrough tool that is helping organizations scale their business? Well, there are two sides to this. Talking in terms of the advantages that BI offers, there is not the slightest doubt. These tools have allowed organizations to analyze data and take business critical decisions.

“BI today is being considered as an mainstream enterprise application. The transaction application is meant for standard reports meant for transaction reporting. Plus there are multiple applications and multiple data sources in an enterprise. Connecting these discrete data sources and presenting them in a single reporting view is a challenge. BI has made this possible and it is a breakthrough technology,” said Mehta.

That said, the other side, essentially the side where BI is being used by the IT team in an organization, has a somewhat different perspective. Even the CIOs do not dispute the benefits of BI, they do maintain that certain changes need to be made so as to allow the organizations to fully harness the power of BI.

“The biggest challenge that an organization faces is to get ‘clean’ data. However most BI tools require powerful servers. It should be user friendly and need the least amount of user training so that the end user can start using the application within a couple of hours. Also it should be easy to implement and it should not require a huge amount of server resources,” said Adenwala.

Bapat on the other hand feels that the top management support, clean implementation, user training and user willingness are key to the acceptance of BI as a tool. He is appreciative of the fact that suggestions that he has made from an implementation and roll out angle have been built into the newer versions. He said, “Vendors need to select an implementation partner who is well versed with the ‘domain’ so as to talk the ‘user’s language’. This would help a great deal in easy acceptance and early appreciation of BI.”

Changes made in this manner could well allow organizations to effectively use BI. That said, suggestions from the CIOs’ side are always welcome. This helps in making the product more advanced. Herein lies an opportunity for vendors to address these requirements. As for BI, organizations are even looking at the next generation BI, i.e., BI 2.0, Asit C Mehta being one of them.

neeraj.gandhi@expressindia.com