A single version of the truth

The way we do business today is rather different from the business models followed in the old economy. Our business partners make huge demands for standards compliance; customers are very particular and know just what they want. New economy businesses are extremely tech savvy, so technology is no longer the differentiator. The only way to gain a lead over the competition is by ensuring high customer satisfaction levels, or through innovative products and services. One can even look into the existing customer base and create strategies to derive more revenue from it.

It's important to understand the market for your products/services and also to know customer preferences. That's a huge task in itself that can be done quickly and effectively through Business Intelligence (BI).

Every business needs to devise enterprise strategies, make forecasts, and identify new market opportunities. The use of Business Intelligence tools makes these jobs easier, faster, and less resource-intensive.

An enterprise should understand that BI is a business project aimed at business users for business benefits. BI is not essentially an IT affair.

Indian enterprises, especially in verticals like BFSI, telecom, and manufacturing have been early movers with the use of BI tools. And companies like Standard Chartered Bank and ICICI Bank have created BI teams/cells to harvest better benefits from results thrown up from the BI systems.

In this issue, we explore the ways in which the use of BI can benefit your organization. We have also featured user perspective in the form of quotes and short articles from CIOs of organizations using BI. As a special treat, we are privileged to present an exclusive BI user case study with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). RBI has India's largest data warehouse and uses BI tools for better revenue tracking, and a 'single version of the truth.'

Among regular case studies, we have featured Tata Teleservices, which has consolidated its server base and overcome problems it faced in a heterogeneous environment. There's also a look at how New Holland Tractors (India) Pvt. Ltd has used Web-based services and an SMS-based solution to introduce better workflow.

Our correspondents spoke to senior personnel in IBM and CA who talked about the scope of treating IT resources as any other utility like water and electricity. Enterprises can use additional computing resources as-and-when required. And then effectively switch on and off the use of IT resources in their servers and storage systems depending on workload. This way, companies only pay for what they use.

While we were putting together this issue, we also simultaneously conducted a three-city seminar called Infrastructure Strategies 2003. These seminars received overwhelming response in the cities of Mumbai, Chennai, and New Delhi, and were graced by some of the most prominent personalities in the India CIO/CTO/IT Head community.

And we also held a series of CIO roundtables in select cities. That gave us an opportunity to interact directly with CIOs from different industry verticals.

We bring you excerpts from these events and the valuable insights that CIOs received.