In IT managers are betting big on Business Analytics (BA) and leveraging its advantages in making use of data, statistical techniques and prediction models to provide insights into business performance. BA has been making inroads slowly into organisations and throwing up huge opportunity for the IT heads and enabling them to provide information in real time to help the business groups to make informed decisions.
Industry estimates put the BA market size at $105 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 7-8 per cent, and as per the recent CIO study 83 per cent of business leaders identified analytics as a top priority for their businesses.
According to Ajay Sharma, Director (Users Data & Analytics), Yahoo R&D India, The use of BA tools will help the organization to have competitive edge and in understanding market pulse from time to time. One can analyse customer behaviour, lifestyle and life events to provide targeted product and services. IT heads are leveraging the software to predict customer behaviour, preferences and needs, based on analysis of historical data.
IT managers highlight three main trends that is observed across industries regardless of company size:
(a) Large increase in volume of data,
(b) Utilisation of social media as a key data source, and
(c) Challenges in implementation and innovation.
Accordingly, this brings a tremendous increase in the volume of work in business analytics. Specifically, the area of predictive analytics has an increased momentum. Industry predictions indicate that companies will increase their 2011 appetite for predictive analytics by over 200 per cent from the previous years.
In India too, the trends are more or less the same. Most of the IT heads in India look at BA as tool that will take off in the near future. According to me Business Analytics will help in making quick decisions based on the available report and transform the way of doing business, says Ranganathan N, Manager-BITS, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd. He further adds, Organisation like ours face diverse challenges with fierce global competition and stringent regulatory requirements and this drives the demand for BA.
However, customer acquisitions retention and profitability remain the key concerns. Additionally, reduced margins, risk management, new products initiatives have put tremendous pressure on traditional decision-making tools, adds Ranganathan.
Rajesh Ranjan, Program Director, Mindtree Ltd feels that smartphones and tablets are actually fueling the demand of BA. The earlier concept of Business Intelligence and Business Analytics being server based centralised operations is giving way to self service and managed entitlements in today's recurring business model. I believe that 50 per cent of BA will be available on mobile phones in the coming years, concludes Ranjan.
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