Enlightening with Intelligence

The Business Intelligence (BI) platform, still considered as a white elephant by most IT managers, though not highly pervasive in the market, has made a transition from its traditional image to make its presence felt across industry verticals. It is beyond doubt that the business demand for a proper BI tool is growing within organisations, though the adoption ratio has not kept pace with the demand.

Bhavish Sood, Research Director, Gartner India, observes a cultural change enveloping the Indian firms where the top management is concerned about performance and operational excellence and ready to make the necessary investments, if it makes business sense. At this point of time, BI software platform is not pervasive in the country, as the market stands at about $62 mn, with BI solutions primarily used for its reporting capabilities, maintains Sood.

It would not be an exaggeration to say, as analysts endorsed, that ease of use factor is now surpassing functionality and BI is considered a comprehensive tool.

From an adoption standpoint, KN Swaminathan, GM, IS, TVS Motors, maintains that BI is still in the nascent stages, even while the sales planning tool is actively being demonstrated in the companies.

Satish Pendse, President, Highbar Technologies, who has implemented SAP BI and Business Objects, confirms that IT managers are looking forward to BI to provide the value of IT to the business, once they are done with the implementation of transaction systems such as ERP.

Pendse agrees that the adoption of BI may not be aggressive as long as the challenges from the business users continues. The business users need to develop the habit of depending on data-based analytics as against the practice of experience-based perception, argues Pendse. However, according to him, high data transaction industries such as banks, financial services, airlines, telecom and a few others have absorbed the BI platform.

Kapil Mehrotra, Head, Applications, iYogi Services Ltd, who has tested out a few vendor solutions, finds a growing need amongst the business users to seek right information, for the right decision-makers, at the right time.

Suresh Shanmugam, Head, Business Information Technology Solutions, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd, from his experience in implementing a BI tool, finds the top management being convinced with the idea that BI is the key to run a performance-oriented organisation.

It is observed that enterprises have accepted the concept of providing data to customers, and empowering them with the ability to navigate and visualise data in a real-time mode rather than a report-only structure.

Estimating the BI market to be in tune of $90 mn in the next one year time, Srikanth Karnakota, Director, Server & Tools Business, Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt Ltd, admits that enterprises have started realising that BI relates to profitability and is an important tool for efficient business.

The maturity of adoption is best seen among BFSI, telecom and retail, followed by process and discrete manufacturing industries, informs Karnakota.

Prashant Tiwari, Country Manager, Cognos & Business Analytics, IBM Software Group India/South Asia, observes that core banking solutions are taking to BI to address customer requirements and are increasingly leveraging MIS reporting for speed to market. According to him, the automobile industry is using BI to generate data around its deal management applications and telecom is trying to increase its operational efficiency using BI.

Maneesh Sharma, Head, Business Analytics and Technology, SAP India, is bullish about BI market which has been thrown up a $10.5 bn opportunity in 2010, and is expected to grow at a significant momentum. Organisations, including the SME sector is looking at deploying BI tool which will be the differentiator in the competitive market, says Sharma.

Yes, the BI wave has caught up, but the fears have not faded away as the IT managers still face certain barriers to it.

Barriers to BI
Despite acknowledging the virtues that BI offers, IT managers do find certain barriers to its deployment. For instance, TVSs Swaminathan says the main reason for the slow adoption of BI is the lack of a proper tool from any vendor which can be configured and implemented immediately. All solution providers want to take their own sweet time to understand requirement, create a solution, etc., while the users demand quick a solution which can be implemented in a week's time and can be enhanced with ease and speed, he says.

Most IT heads echoed that BI is very expensive, while the performance observed is subject to several conditions.

SAPs Sharma also agrees that cost is a big inhibitor and as a result, the vendors are tapping the packaged projects along with the other solutions to help customers get off the ground quickly with BI adoption.

According to IBMs Tiwari, lack of involvement from the business group is a deterrent.

Availability and quality of data is a discouraging factor, as one would need previous data in order to fetch better benefits. Pendse maintains that promise versus delivery gap has inhibited the adoption and there is considerable cycle time between investments and getting back value for the business.

Application heads like Mehrotra opine that BI market is a confusing product landscape possessing a widely divergent and technology cost model, with complicated deployment amidst operational limitation.

In BI implementation, the IT managers are often challenged with regard to performance, relevance and ease of use. Another distressing factor that Karnakota observes is that the IT heads are not clear about what they expect from BI system and in many cases, translation of a business decision-making system is not the outcome of tools that are implemented.

The cost of implementation, quality of data and mindset of traditional economy organisations are also some of the inhibitors . However, those who have implemented BI seem to be reaping certain benefits.

Neighbours Envy, IT Manager's Pride
Amidst constraints, IT managers are candid about creating value out of BI by creating profit opportunity for business groups. Those who have implemented BI, vouched for the benefits that it provided in meeting managements business needs.

iYogi Services which has over 5000 employees has implemented Microsoft BI tools and Cognos to address varied functions. iYogis Mehrotra has deployed Cognos solutions for query and reporting which ensures that users are equipped with the information they need to make fact-based decisions in a system that is simpler, faster and easy to manage. Analysis tools from Cognos have enabled iYogi to explore information easily and intuitively to drive smarter business decision. Cognos score carding has helped in capturing corporate strategy and communicate it at the operational level, reiterates Mehrotra.

Besides, the solution has helped executives and managers to provide quantifiable goals and targets. According to Mehrotra, the BI tool has allowed the managers to track performance across business units, operating subsidiaries and geographic regions. The dashboard capabilities have allowed users to access, interact and personalise content in a way that drove quick decision-making.

Elaborating on the investment criteria, Mehrotra maintains, Depending upon the functions and features that is required, implementing a BI solution would call for an investment to the tune of Rs 50 lakh to 2 crore, which includes hardware, software and user licenses.

Swaminathan has initiated implementation of SAP BW and Microstrategy BI tools within TVS group to take advantage of the drill down reporting, dashboards, publishing data on BlackBerry instruments, alerts through mails and so on.

Explaining the modus operandi of the BI working process, Swaminathan maintains, Though we are not very satisfied with its output, the tools that we have deployed take data from the ERP and SQL databases. The data is then presented in specified formats. Structured reports, which users require at different frequencies, are provided to them. Some users require the data on their BlackBerry instruments, which is met using these tools. We require certain information to be pumped to users at various frequencies, which we are able to do with these tools, he adds.

Swaminathan observes that the investment on BI would be anywhere between Rs 2 to 3 crore, if its full potential is to be realised, which would be towards hardware, software licenses and persons trained to configure user requirements.

Highlighting the inherent benefits that BI tool could offer, Swaminathan says that it helped in evolving a structured report ready for users and improved manpower productivity.

For Satish Pendse, who has implemented SAP BI and Business Objects, the BI meet the needs of analytics and KPIs of various functions such as project monitoring, HR, equipment monitoring, procurement and materials management and a few others. BI provided dashboards to meet the top layer of these functions and for the head of the business, says Pendse.

Some of the capabilities of BI that impressed Pendse and his team were rugged back-end, easy to integrate SAP-ERP, excellent user-friendly front-end with user likable dashboards.

Since Pendse went in for the entire suite of SAP which included ERP, CRM, SRM, etc., he could avail considerable advantage in the license cost.
With regard to investment of BI, I would say around 25 per cent of the ERP cost would be the BI cost, maintains Pendse.

Financial services organisation such as Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd, implemented MAIAs 1KEY BI scheduler solutions for reporting, business analysis and mass mailing requirement and witnessed 25 per cent increase in business productivity. (Refer to case study)

BI Capabilities
Despite the resistance and low take off, , BI vendors continue to control the majority stake in the market revenue and some have succeeded in selling into their expansive installed base. They have been promising new releases featuring tighter enterprise application process, and stressing vertical integration that create vertical specific templates. IBMs Tiwari has worked out a packaged BI solution, Cognos Express, targeted at the mid-market which comes with multi-level features aimed to meeting customer requirements across functions by creating a single window for data warehousing, real-time monitoring, integration with core-system, and so on.

SAPs Sharma recommends that IT managers should start the BI deployment in smaller and phased manner to fetch better benefits as this will enable the company to identify loopholes. According to him, verticalisaton of BI is gaining prominence as sectors like Oil and Gas, BFSI, healthcare and retail are buying into this concept and tweaking to their needs. According to Sharma, vertical-specific templates such as SAPs Out of the Box tool embedded with analytics that comes with project level configuration has reduced the complexity of organisational workflow by 80 per cent.

According to Microsofts Karnakota, the line of business application poses most challenges with its silos approach to information storage. He recommends understanding the hooks, provided by the line of business, to open its information store for a BI solution, as the starting step.
To use BI to the best advantage, IT managers should evaluate which applications need to be interfaced with, and ensure the APIs and hooks to the information stored are unlocked, says Karnakota.

Karnakota agrees with his peers that vertical BI is intended to solve common issues in the vertical, while at the same time providing simplicity in usage and less reliance on IT, besides integration with various databases and operating environments are vital.

From BI capabilities standpoint, iYogis Mehrotra has witnessed increased sales after implementing BI solutions, besides rise in customer loyalty and retention, increase in the accuracy and timeliness of sales forecasts, budgeted sales, and accuracy of future behaviour predictions of prospects and customers.

Mehrotra has witnessed maximum saving on operations side as BI has enabled collaboration within a business, improved enterprise reporting and unearthed hidden, forgotten and lost data.
While it is difficult to segregate the tangible from the intangible benefits of BI, Mehrotra admits that it has led to cost reduction, revenue improvement, headcount reduction, and lowered TCO; and most of all increased customer satisfaction, creating a risk-free smart work flow.

Is Consumerisation of BI Real?
According to Gartners Sood, BI is on its way to becoming a commodity solution, paving the way for consumerisation with the market consolidation happening. The vendors are coming up with packaged solutions and lowering the price point to make BI more pervasive, says Sood.
Gartner observes that the users are demanding the same experience from their BI tools that they have come to enjoy with their personal tools. Like the Apple iPhone and iPad, Google and Facebook, BI tools must be intuitive to use, without the need for IT assistance.

While BI still has a long way to go to reach the consumerisation tools status, hope is not lost. TVSs Swaminathan points out, Consumerisation of BI is possible, if BI can tell people what they do not know based on the underlying data.

Pendse is positive about the BI being consumerised, when he reiterates, Availability of BI output on mobile instruments such as smartphones, iPads, etc., is greatly helping improve the adoption of BI. Over medium term, one can expect this to catch up the attention of business leadership. They will demand BI on mobile instruments from IT Heads and that is going to be a boom time for BI.

SAPs Sharma believes that consumerisation wave is catching up as customers go in for cultural change. BI has transitioned itself from 'nice to have' solution stage to 'must have' solution among business heads who are now contemplating where to start the phenomenon, which is a good sign, argues Sharma.

According to Karnakota, the self-service approach of the business users for access to information through mobile offices cutting across corporate firewalls is driving the consumerisation wave and it would not be surprising if BI will become the most sought after tool.

Road Map
Analysts have clearly seen a positive growth curve for BI, as customers do shift from measurement to analysis, forecasting and optimisation. Going ahead, Gartner predicts that interactive visualisation, predictive analysis, dashboards and online analytical processing (OLAP) usage will increase, with data discovery platforms also earning the highest ease of use and complexity of analysis scores.

The vendors and IT managers agree that there would be increased proliferation of interactive visualisation tools, more integrated data mining and packaged analytic applications that encapsulate the complexity of using sophisticated BI analysis tools from business users.

IT managers are in sync with Gartners predictions in terms of working out ways to absorb BI more aggressively. For instance, TVSs Swaminathan has plans to implement BI tools around planning, budget forecasting and production areas and evaluation of the best tools that are available and which can be a good fit. IT managers across enterprise are excited about the BI implementation idea and process, as it would escalate them in the career growth path. Swaminathan says, Implementing BI solutions add to the career advantage of an IT manager, as the top management gets to appreciate his/her efforts in bringing knowledge and information to the doorsteps of the company in the form of dashboards. The trust reposed in the project leader goes up, he adds.

The future model of BI as per IBMs Tiwaris observation is a statistical mode for analysing the state of defects in the system, finding remedial solutions, and enabling the tool to provide risk-based information in real time.

According to SAPs Sharma, in-memory technology for mobility is gaining prominence which is integrated with social media.

Sharma observes a cloud-driven model around BI evolving and getting into the hybrid mode for reporting and analysis.

As a future initiative, Microsofts primary objective is to cater to the consumerisation of BI aspect. Our aspiration is to ensure scalability and integration with most data sources, ensuring that BI related usage scales go up, maintains Karnakota.

The future of SQL Server and Windows Server will be innovating processors and OEMs to ensure that integrated innovation leads to lower overall costs, with built in OLTP and OLAP\BI capabilities.
Efforts are on by most vendors to integrate BI with the line of business solutions to keep BI stack horizontal, resulting in high degree of customisation.

MAIAs CEO Sanjay Mehta believes that BI will meet the demands of tomorrows digital natives; integrate seamlessly with cloud data and platforms; align people, conversations, and data with business strategy; and make the most of the infrastructures we have today.

Highbars Pendse is working towards creating the wow factor in the BI space by enabling the top management to track KRAs and KPIs with effective backend integration with ERP.

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