Fast Track

Looking beyond BI

Sudipta Sen

The relevance of Business Intelligence (BI) to organisations in India is debatable, especially when you remember that so many of them are still struggling to get their basic enterprise IT infrastructure in place. CIOs of many large corporations tell of shrinking or static IT budgets; those who are more fortunate can at best hope for a 3 to 5 percent annual budget increase.

Says Sudipta Sen of SAS, “It has been shown that the best way to unlock the business value buried deep within existing IT investments and enterprise systems is through effective implementation of BI solutions.”

Managing growth, profitability, customer expectations, compliance and the like are becoming critical for organisations. Additionally, the amount of data that resides in an organisation doubles every 1,100 days.

BI and associated tools such as corporate performance management and balanced scorecard are on the investment agenda of BFSI, telecom and pharmaceuticals. Businesses in BFSI and telecom want to analyse high net worth individuals so that they can focus on them and offer customised products or services.

Large businesses are focussing on secondary sales, and they want to identify patterns in customer purchases so that they can plan their capacities and production to reduce wastage. These factors are driving large businesses to look at Six Sigma and solutions such as Balanced Scorecard or Corporate Performance Management. Sen adds: “Some large businesses are going a step further and using BI tools to analyse where they should be focussing on and what changes they have to make in their production and supply chains to boost their profits further.”

The BI market in India is growing at 30 percent CAGR, which is huge considering that even the Indian software services market is growing at around 18 percent annually.

—Venkatesh Ganesh