It’s been quite many years since IT has been seen as a business-supporting and enabling function. Everybody, from research firms to vendors to media, has noted that IT needs to be aligned to business objectives in the organisation.

The slowdown that’s passing by did make the chorus even louder.

However, most of the IT areas are expected to support business objectives by ways such as lowering of IT costs, converting capex into opex and ensuring quicker RoI. Some areas fare still better, by employing more direct ways to make IT dynamic and responsive to business needs. Some of these areas are virtualisation, sales force automation and enterprise mobility.

None of these, however, give IT the chance to have a close participation in determining business goals and strategising towards achieving those goals.
Do Business Intelligence and Business Analytics help in interlinking the IT and business functions more cohesively?  Potentially yes.

Some organisations that have successfully done BI implementations haven taken the approach of having a core team in place to work out greater BI and BA benefits for the organisation. Often, these teams have members from both IT and business teams, who work closely towards extracting advantages of BI for the organisation.

Krishnakumar Avanoor, Customer Care Associate & Deputy General Manager, Solutions and Technology Team, Shopper’s Stop Ltd, who has been leading the BI implementation at his organisation, says, “There is a core team that works on the more sophisticated aspects of BI and BA. The team has 75% participation from business side while the remaining members are from IT. We feel that strong business participation is a must for the success of BI.”

“It’s been around 18 months since the BI deployment was initiated in the organisation. We have made satisfactory progress and are steadily moving towards a mature BI environment,” he notes.

Growing dependence
The business environment has become highly competitive, and more importantly, increasingly complex. Technological excellence is easy to emulate and surpass and as such a product can’t differentiate much—and for long—in terms of features.

To be ahead of the competition in the one-up game, enterprises are warming up more to BI and BA tools.

While BI has already been around for some time as a logical progression from data warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP), the uptake of BA is also picking up slowly.

“In particular, in case of greenfield deployments, organisations are opting for both BI and BA tools,” notes Ashit Panjwani, Executive Director, Sales-Marketing & Alliance, SAS India.

In case of legacy systems, however, IT managers sometimes take a step-by-step approach. They first deploy BI tools and only when they have satisfactorily monitored the quality of querying and reporting for some time, they move on to the next step.

Experts feel this is a good approach, as it de-risks a BI/BA strategy by ensuring that data coming from legacy systems is in a format and structure that lends itself to new reporting requirements. Any gaps can be noted and corrections can be made accordingly.

The step-by-step approach also ensures that those departments in an organisation that are comfortable to migrate to BI reporting tools take the plunge first while others can come on the board later.

“It’s a cultural change, where some departments are quicker to move on to new forms of reporting while some others are still comfortable with the traditional reports,” feels Avanoor of Shopper’s Stop.

However, initiating BI also promotes and facilitates a cultural shift, as Bhavish Sood, Principal Analyst—BI, Gartner Asia-Pacific, points out, “BI will be a key enabler in building information-oriented culture within an enterprise and should be an important deployment priority. Indian enterprises should not confuse BI technology selection as the end goal of a BI initiative.”

“Many BI initiatives fail to deliver sustainable business value primarily due to lack of business sponsorship leading to weak commitment, lack of business engagement in the process, and finally IS not being involved in supporting benefit realisation,” Sood cautions.

Quality of data
It is often said that a BI or BA solution can be only as good as the quality of data. If the quality of data is suspect, it can actually lead to an implementation failure, which can be catastrophic for the organisation.

Ensuring data integrity across various systems can sometimes be a nightmare, and this is one area that can be challenging for the IT manager entrusted with the task.  

Panjwani of SAS feels that this is a very critical area and that vendors have an important role to play in this regard. Can a consultative approach towards implementation take care of the issue? He agrees, noting that BI is not something that is best suited off the shelf and a consultative approach is surely the way to go.

Not that packaged offerings are not available. “Packaged analytics have been around for some time and they have a time-to-market advantage. Many vendors also have a consulting approach but I think the way the market will buy is in a hybrid—part pre packaged and supported by some customisation as required,” says Sood of Gartner, looking at the market from an analyst’s viewpoint.

Saurabh Verma, who manages BI market research at IDC India observes, “Consulting does play a vital role, but mostly in the large data warehousing type of deployments. Basic dashboard solutions are available off the shelf and easy to deploy too. Consulting and system integration come into play only when there is work required at the back end for data cleaning.”

Having said that, those organisations where data integration has attained a level of maturity are not worried. “We have been following best practices to ensure the quality of data in the organisation. The process is quite mature with necessary checks being in place and hardly any exceptions being allowed,” says Avanoor of Shopper’s Stop.

BI framework
What constitutes BI? While there can’t be a complete consensus on this, given the different solution perspectives, as per the definition used by market research firm IDC India, BI solutions cover Advanced Analytics/BA and End User Query Reporting and Analysis (EUQRA), which includes dashboards.

As per IDC’s estimates, the total India BI market in 2009 stood at US$ 41.3 million, and is expected to grow at a rate of 20% for the next five years.

However, both BI and BA can be deployed independently, says Sandeep Sharma, BI analyst at IDC India. “A reason why BA is deployed after BI typically is primarily due to the organisation’s maturity. A mid-size organisation will be more interested in day-to-day operations, but as the organisation grows, it will want to get into statistical modelling, forecasting, and other complex ways of looking at the business, when BA comes into the picture,” he says.

Panjwani of SAS sees the BI framework as constituted by four key building blocks—data integration, analytics, reporting and business issue or business challenge.

“Each of these blocks is equally important, but then it is the business challenge for which the other three come into being and as such it is necessary that the first three blocks are linked to the business challenge. This forms the basis of a successful BI implementation,” Panjwani emphasises.

Going mainstream
Contrary to the general perception, today BI tools are available to suit the needs of all size and type of businesses.

Panjwani strongly agrees with this. But, are there some verticals that have seen more BI implementations by comparison? “Well, there have been more implementations in organisations from BFSI, manufacturing, telecom, government, IT/ITeS and pharmaceutical verticals, but it is equally relevant to all organisations across other verticals as well,” he reemphasises.

Verma of IDC also feels that EUQRA kind of solutions can be adopted by an organisation of any size and there are many small ISVs offering such solutions. However, advanced analytics solutions need much greater user maturity as well as structured and clean data at the backend. Though advanced analytics tools are expensive, they are useful for larger organisations as they help manage volumes and need greater user maturity.

“The market will continue to have a mix of both large and small ISVs for EUQRA solutions, but the advanced analytics space will continue to be dominated by the larger software vendors,” his colleague Sandeep at IDC comments.

Not everybody is on the bandwagon yet. Many organisations still believe, and with sound reasons, that they will be better off delaying BI implementations by another few years.

Jacob Livingstone, Manager-IT at Bhilai Engineering Corporation Ltd, says his organisation is being served very well by the existing ERP system and it will be only after another two to three years that it will become advantageous to go for a BI implementation.

Sure, there will be benefits to be reaped in the long run. “After we have the required preparedness, we can go for a BI implementation. A good database at the backend and BI tools can help us go for long-lead items,” Livingstone says.

Looking ahead
Gartner had talked of “Advanced Analytics” in Top 10 predictions for 2010. How cleanly do BI and BA fit into the concept?

We have reached the point in the improvement of performance and costs that we can afford to perform analytics and simulation for each and every action taken in the business, says Sood. Not only will data center systems be able to do this, but mobile devices will have access to data and enough capability to perform analytics themselves, potentially enabling use of optimisation and simulation everywhere and every time, he adds.

From BI and BA, the market will next move to the “Advanced Analytics” stage, Gartner had said in its 2010 predictions early this year.

Sood explains the concept, “This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions. Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through CRM or ERP or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimisation and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.”

“Another way to view this is as a shift in timing. Business intelligence has mainly provided us historical analysis, increasingly powerful ways of analysing what has already happened. We can increase the scope of the information that is analysed and we can reduce delays between the data creation and its analysis, but at heart this is a look backwards. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen,” he adds.

Advanced analytics also involves new technologies to search unstructured content and other search enhancements.

There is a steady progress that organisations are making. Avanoor of Shopper’s Stop says, “While prediction and forecasting is not full blown yet, we do make use of analytics and modelling for specific purposes in certain key areas.”

“One of our key BI goals for this year is to provide dashboards for senior management,” he notes.

Yet, organisations in India are not among the frontrunners in implementing Advanced Analytics solutions. Verma of IDC India agrees, “The global markets are a lot more advanced as compared to India on account of the maturity of their processes, automation, data capture and management.”

“Leverage analytics to compete at the global level” is the message that needs to be there, Panjwani feels.

“It’s time to evaluate BI, if not implement.” That’s IT Next’s take.

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The author is an ICT/Media market researcher