Market consolidation has been the overpowering trend in the business intelligence (BI) market. With Oracle acquiring Hyperion, followed by SAP acquiring Business Objects, and IBMs acquisition of Cognos, the year 2007 will be remembered as the year when software biggies strengthened and consolidated their position in the BI market.

This feverish pace of acquisitions and the premium paid by these companies in acquiring BI vendors point to the important role BI is going to play in the future. At the same time, this has left CIOs with numerous questions in their mind. CIOs are keen to find out how these acquisitions are going to affect the product road maps and the support contracts for their existing BI investments.

Taking BI to the Masses
Even as CIOs are grappling with these basic questions, theres a bigger concernof how to get the most out of BI investmentsthat has begun to grab their attention. That, in turn, is leading BI into yet another direction, or rather the next phase of its evolution. The trend is moving toward pervasive BI, which has the potential of dramatically changing the way business is carried out.

As CIOs brave on to take the leap of faith, BI in enterprises today is moving beyond the hands of a select few and percolating further down the line to the operational level. BI in its new avatar, called Operational BI or Pervasive BI, is no longer relegated to just being strategic business decision making tool for the top management and business analysts.

Driven by market pressures to quickly respond to the dynamic business environment, CIOs now need to look at leveraging BI for optimizing and streamlining business operations on a daily basis by taking BI to the functional level.

The third generation of BI is focusing on the front line workers and providing them with increased business insight within the context of the business processes in which they are involved to drive real time action. They can use advanced BI features like alerts, dashboards, and ad hoc reporting to improve their day-to-day decision-making.

The existing trends in the BI space are data mining for finding hidden patterns in existing data. The future trends include better usage of knowledge management across the business spectrum. Web 2.0 and social networking have to be factored in. This works with a mix of data mining, text mining, and knowledge management. The CIO has to be in a position to evaluate new technologies and adopt them, as and when required.

The Fundamentals
At a broader level, the key things for CIOs to keep in mind when it comes to BI adoption and analytics in their organizations are: people, process, and technology issues right from conceptualization to implementation to adherence.

Successful implementation of BI requires CIOs to ensure that the objectives for BI/analytics implementation must be clear. This includes a good understanding of the business problems that warrant the need for BI. One must not get in because everyone is doing it. The fundamental question the CIO will need to answer is why do we need BI? It is also critical to have a knowledge base/management: data from all business processes available in a central location. Other pre-requisites for CIOs are to have better understanding on the information need by business leaders to business front-runners in order to make better business decisions; a solid grip on the future directions/trends; and awareness of the limitations of the existing traditional IT systems.

Going into specifics, firstly, CIOs need to keep in mind that BI and analytics are as good as base data and hence the need arises to have a robust basic system to capture the transactional data. Secondly, these systems are not just IT systems but also comprise clear and sound business processes. Once basic data is available, it is useful to analyze past data and find trends. This is when the role and significance of predictive analytics (PA) comes into picture.

PA is taking an increasingly important role in enterprise decision management systems. Traditional BI does an extremely effective job of providing a retrospective and aggregated understanding of data. PA allows enterprises to extract latent information present in their data and derive a prescriptive and actionable understanding that can be applied at the level of each and every business transaction. Overall, meeting business user requirements on information need in real-time can be considered to be a world-class BI and analytics solution.

Data warehouse appliances are an area that has seen a lot of interest. Data warehouse appliances take commodity hardware and build an extremely powerful database for BI. These appliances lower the TCO. Furthermore, the simple architecture provided by them allows the data warehouse to scale very easily.

Data forms the core of the BI system. Enterprise applications are generating large amounts of data. Among the critical things that a CIO needs to keep in mind on the data front, is ensuring a system to extract relevant data from the business or transaction systems without having to shut the transaction system. Also, cleansing and de-duplication of the data is a critical success factor.

It is important to ensure that there is single record, which is correct, and it is the same data in the same format across the organization. Before this data can enter BI pipe, substantial work needs to be carried out on data quality and master data management front. All these factors are going to be important for CIOs.

Vendor and Implementation Partner
The right vendor and implementation partner go a long way in determining the success of BI adoption in an enterprise. The basic factors that the CIO needs to consider while selecting the BI vendor is the degree to which the product meets the organizations functional requirements, the technology platform that impacts integration with existing IT systems, commercial considerations, the vendors financial strength (as it impacts scalability and expansion in the future), domain expertise, and the success rate at other implementation sites.

An implementation partner is required if you do not have the right functional and technical expertise within the organization. The role of the implementation partner is like a facilitator or an interface that understands the business needs and facilitates implementation to meet these requirements.

All things said and done, it ultimately boils down to the nuts and bolts of usage. The implementation partner not only fixes the system but is also responsible for porting data, ensuring the application is operational, and also train the user. The last aspect of training is very important as BI solutions fail to take off because the user has either been improperly trained, or is afraid of using new hi-tech systems.

The key things to keep in mind when choosing the implementation partner are implementation experience, tool knowledge, training expertise, HR skills and, most importantly, the support system.

Shipra Malhotra
shipram@cybermedia.co.in

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