Are Indian enterprises ready for BI?

Today, storage requirements are enormous and information overload is a concern. Organisations need to extract intelligence from stored data. Business Intelligence (BI) maybe be a solution but are Indian organisations ready for it? CIOs raised their concerns 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. The 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 sessions were moderated by Val Souza, the Consulting Editor of Express Computer Delivering the keynote, Jim Davis, Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer, SAS Institute spoke about BI's relevance to Indian enterprises. Anil Nadkarni spoke about the importance of accurate data capture for effective BI analysis. R P Singh 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