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Dataquest, in association with Wipro, held a tri-city event on business
intelligence at Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai recently. Prasanto Kumar Roy, chief
editor, Dataquest moderated the Delhi event while the Bengaluru event was
moderated by Rajneesh De, associate editor, Dataquest. Both spoke on how BI as
an application is currently in high demand by enterprises, especially in todays
recessionary economy where every customer interfacing company is tracking
relevant data to leverage business benefits.
Dr Srinivas Vegy of Wipro spoke about the BI trends from an SI perspective
and highlighted how customers across different industry verticals can benefit
from BI. Through his presentation, Afaq Chunawala, technology specialist on BI
from Microsoft, highlighted the challenges of implementing BI in organizations
and shared insights on how to resolve them while empowering the end users with a
successful BI rollout. He also presented a step-by-step approach to using a BI
application on the Microsoft Sequel Server series.
Expressing his views on BI, Umesh Krishnamurthy, program manager, Wipro
pointed out how BI has been emerging as an important business tool and has well
matured as a solution over the years. In answer to the common question regarding
RoI on BI investments, he said RoI is not always directly visible. A lot of it
depends on the usage pattern: BI is not just automating manual functions. When
a data is on BI it is considered to be a clean data. The issue is whether the
data is going to the downstream application and generating intelligent analytics
and reports, he said. It is very important to have a clear business roadmap to
get the best out of BI applications or else it might create many inconsistencies
or duplications. BI helps to create a single and consistent source of data
across all departments. That is intelligent management of data through better
reports and analytics out of the existing data, creating a more effective
business functionality that will lead to better RoI, he added.
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| Rajesh Uppal, Vijay Sethi, Vikas Guru and Parambir Singh in
Delhi. Discussing the change in Indian enterprises usage pattern of BI |
According to Raghavendra Prabhu, manager, technical sales, Microsoft, since
companies have a way to store their valuable data there should also be a way to
intelligently manage and use the data across all departments and applications
and build business competencies on the same. Our solutions help the user to
analyze and build reports on data for intelligent use. The solutions are
performance oriented and scalable in nature, he informed.
One strong debate that always gets associated with BI is whether it is a
discretionary spend or if there is a significant value addition and strong RoI
through BI implementation which is fairly visible and quick. BI in general is
looked upon as a very high-end technical investment that is beneficial primarily
for large corporates. However, the scenario is changing. The panel discussions
in Delhi and Mumbai were exceptionally interactive and touched upon almost every
aspect of BI and its uptake in enterprises. The panelists in Mumbai included
some of the most reputed names in the industry such as Arun Gupta, group CTO,
Shoppers Stop; V Subramaniam, CIO, Otis Elevtor Company; Dhiren Savla, CIO,
Kuoni Travels Group; Umesh Mehta, VP, IT, Asia Motor Works; Sona Saha Das, head,
IT, Infostar; Vikas Prabhu, VP,IT, Essar Telecom Retail; Vinay Hinge, GM, IT,
Raymond; Feroze Shaikh, technical head, PrimeFocus; P Salunke, GM, IT, ICPL
Labs. In Delhi the panel witnessed some vivid discussion on the subject by
prominent CIOs like Rajesh Uppal from Maruti, Vijay Sethi from Hero Honda, Vikas
Guru from MTNL and Parambir Singh from SAIL. In Bengaluru the panel consisted of
Ashok Kumar Sharma, CTO, Crane Software International, Navin Kulkarni, director,
business development, Philips Research, Arindrajit Ray, senior director,
technology, Ness Technologies.
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| P Salunke, Sona Saha Das, Dhiren Savla, Arun Gupta, V
Subramaniam, Vinay Hinge, Umesh Mehta, Vikas Prabhu in Mumbai. Indian
enterprises are yet to achieve the maturity level of predictive analyses
that BI promises |
During the panel discussions the first question raised was whether there has
been a change in usage patterns and a democratization of BI in enterprises with
all set of users leveraging on the benefits of BI and analytical tools. The
likes of Gupta, Subramaniam, Uppal, Sethi and several other CIOs said that there
has been a definite change in the usage patterns and spoke of how every
department in an organization were earlier dependent on several reports
generated to plan and strategize and even make process changes. With the
increasing emphasis on data capturing and data quality, and funneling the data
downwards, the use of BI increased and this has been definitely impacting the
way organizations and departments deal with data as a resource. It was mentioned
how the graphical user interfaces and how creating visual data is critical for
the ease-of-use of BI applications. Quality of data came out as a key factor for
a successful BI deployment.
Savla spoke of how critical it is to capture accurate data especially in the
tourism industry and accordingly plan and launch products. When the panel was
asked how mature are organizations today in adopting BI and whether they have
evolved beyond maintaining data in MS Excel sheets, Hinge spoke of how Excel is
still the basic database format used in most organizations today. However, BI
applications can be used to co-relate various databases and cull out the
required results. He also gave an example of how Raymonds has implemented a BI
tool to keep track of inventory, sales, and product lines.
Prabhu evoked a slight skepticism especially on the maturity levels of Indian
enterprises in adopting BI tools. He was of the opinion that most enterprises
have been able to carry out data warehousing well but still have to start
analyzing the data to achieve the kind of predictive analysis that BI promises.
Das also shared similar views that BI in Indian enterprises has still not
reached the stage of predictive analysis. She was of the strong opinion that
companies today have successfully managed to capture data electronically and are
in the process of slicing and dicing the data to create reports that can be
graphically represented. However, Gupta differed in his opinion stating that
maturity levels in BI differed from industry to industry. He gave an example of
the retail industry where he said that inventory and merchandise is planned in
advance based on predictive analysis and effective use of BI.
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| Ashok Kumar Sharma, Arindrajit Ray, Prasanto Kumar Roy and
Navin Kulkarni in Bengaluru discussing that operational BI is a must and can
prove to be a lifeline for key decision makers across organizations |
Hinge too expressed similar views saying that operational BI is a must and is
carried out regularly across all the user groups within the organization.
However, predictive or exotic, BI is very seasonal in the retail industry and is
usually accessed by the key decision makers in the organization. Salunke Labs
said that predictive analysis and BI is a lifeline for pharmaceutical companies
who are strong in R&D as they have to gauge the demand for certain drugs years
in advance. Subramaniam also expressed similar views about the significance of
predictive analysis and BI in the manufacturing domain where it has improved
cycle times and reduced response periods. According to Ray, BI is no longer a
luxury but a critical part of ones business process. BI has evolved a lot and
it has become more affordable and accessible in terms of both pricing as well as
usage. The democratization aspect also includes exposing ones data to outside
not only for internal consumption but also for external partners involved in
some kind of research or studies on behalf of companies, he explained. Data
warehouse is built over time and its the cleaning, managing, and intelligent
usage of data to enhance business gains is what matters. And here BI
applications comes to play. Therefore, today its an integral part of business,
and a business need for future growth, he said further.
The discussions also highlighted on the consolidation within the BI space
where large vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle have acquired smaller players
thus adding to their BI capabilities. Some of the panelists also appreciated the
fact that many of the vendors have been continuously innovating in BI and have
come up with vertical specific products and specialized BI models in addition to
the generic solutions. Also the increasing integration between ERP applications,
enterprise applications with BI tools has made adoption easier for
organizations. Subramaniam made a very significant point that while deploying
BI, businesses need to identify the KPI, the measures and the dimensions or the
way data is presented. He also said that organizations need to synergize
business with the available BI tools to drive a cultural change. Compliance and
regulatory issues, licensing issues, outsourcing of BI functions, data security,
privacy issues and the cost-effectiveness and RoI aspects of business
intelligence applications were the other key subjects that were discussed during
the session.
Piyali Guha
with inputs from Priya Kekre
piyalig@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
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