Present-day enterprises cannot ignore the need to have Business Intelligence (BI) IT deployment embedded in their overall growth strategy. Organisations are realising the need to drive business transformation by changing the way information architecture and applications are implemented and managed in their companies.

Indian organisations are now realising that successful implementation of BI technologies will allow them to make more informed decisions that are of strategic value to senior executives. Within organisations, BI is no longer confined to specialised departments or traditional power users such as business analysts and executives. Instead, pervasive BI will drive the next wave of BI deployments.

The BI software market in Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a CAGR (2004-09) of 13.6%. According to an IDC report, India is the fourth largest market for BI in the Asia Pacific region.

BI tools aid decision makers

Transactional software such as ERP, CRM and other legacy software host many gigabytes of data. The information needs of an organisation often call for working with data across systems. This requires a central repository that can host this cross-system data, including data that may be external to the organisation. BI tools provide this facility.

Business decision makers also require intuitive information by slicing and dicing the data across various dimensions in multiple ways. Transactional software is incapable of meeting this requirement, which is best satisfied by BI tools. According to Satish Pendse, CIO, Hindustan Construction Company, “BI tools have become fairly intelligent to provide decision makers with trends, comparisons over multiple dimensions and predictive analytics which are of high value to him.”

In today’s competitive environment, it has become imperative for an organisation to use all available data to attract and retain customers. BI slices through volumes of complex customer, sales, financial, marketing and regulatory data, and lets you analyse key data to obtain an insight into customer behaviour. Eventually BI will become more of an application rather than a set of loosely-coupled technologies that an organisation has to spend significant time integrating.

Following a strategy for BI tools

While deploying BI tools, organisations follow specific strategies or processes. These involve understanding user needs, evaluating various solutions available in the market, and having a group of shortlisted vendors to run a POC (proof of concept) with a view to demonstrating features and functionality.

Eveready Industries, for instance, has deployed BI solution from Oracle and follows three different types of views under its BI strategy. The Conceptual View deals with a broad overview and diagram of what is required to be viewed by the end-users. Under this the company has classified BI into Financial Intelligence, Operations Intelligence, Purchasing Intelligence, HR Intelligence and Sales Intelligence.

In the next stage, data architecture is framed. This is the place where facts and dimensions are defined after talking to users. The organisational and departmental KPIs are framed by HR in discussion with top management. Subsequently, an Implementation View creates workbooks and scorecards based on user feedback at the conceptualisation stage.

Explains Arup Chaudhury, senior manager, IT, Eveready Industries, “As part of the strategy, it is decided that from stage 4 we shall not loop to stage 1 or stage 2 unless a completely new business requirement comes up and is justified by cost reduction or revenue increase.”

Hindustan Construction Company has deployed SAP BI tool primarily as an extension of its previously deployed SAP R/3. Going forward, the company will identify high-applicability potential users and high BI value business functions.

“It will take quite some time for us to exploit the potential of BI to a reasonable extent. We will facilitate the usage for some time till employees become comfortable on their own. Based on the experience of this core group, BI will be deployed to other areas," said Pendse.