V R Srivatsan, regional vice president, South Asia, Business Objects talks to Biztech2 about the emergence of Business Intelligence (BI) as a strategic need for the enterprises and shares his views on the technology.

To what do you attribute the rising popularity of BI at the enterprise level?

The single most important thing responsible for this trend is the enormous growth of information at the enterprise level. The phenomenal rate at which business data is growing, companies are finding it hard to manage it, let alone make efficient use of it. Huge data piles generated across different systems of enterprises has meant that organisations find it increasingly difficult to identify and extract the information they actually need.

Secondly, more often that not these different systems don’t talk to each other. As a result of this, data generated in these, remains scattered and unused at best. Intelligence by nature can never be effective in silos. It is only good when it is holistic and applied in a larger context. I think a lot of people are beginning to realize that while they may have intelligence in specific operational areas, they can only make accurate and fruitful business decisions if they have enterprise-wide intelligence.

So in essence, the growth of information and realization of the need for enterprise-wide actionable intelligence are the two factors that are driving the adoption of BI.

Is it valid to look at BI as something that can squeeze some additional value out of old ERP or CRM investments?

This is a suggestion that is made quite often and in fact many look at BI from this angle. The reason being, that people face many issues when they try to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) on their ERP and CRM investments of the past. By putting some BI tools on top of these systems, it is possible to extract some intelligence and subsequently show a higher ROI. However, this is just a quick-fix approach and it doesn’t fully leverage the potential of data and information present with an organization.

By putting BI on top of an ERP or a CRM, you can get operational intelligence which is just a part of what Business Intelligence can do. In order to truly harness the power of BI, one needs to look at it more strategically and not merely as a tool which gives you some short term benefits. The quick-fix approach will only give you limited intelligence. For real, long-term strategic intelligence, you need to look beyond this methodology and adopt enterprise-scale BI.

Are you suggesting that one should treat BI just like an ERP or CRM system?

Absolutely, it has to be just as available, just as scalable as an ERP, a CRM or any other system. BI has come a long way from its early days and now matured into an intelligent platform that can act as a decision support system in an organization. Its implementation needs to fit into the overall strategic framework of the organization, supported by a holistic information and data management strategy.

The expectations from BI aren’t just limited to running ad-hoc queries and getting static reports anymore. Organisations are increasingly depending on BI systems to perform mission critical business tasks and gain actionable intelligence to base future action plans and such demands require BI to be treated more strategically.

Going forward, what’s the biggest trend in the BI space from a technology perspective?

Traditionally, Business Intelligence systems have focused on structured data and not on the unstructured information scattered throughout the enterprise. With more and more unstructured information pumped into the enterprise, companies are fast realizing the need to manage this information and extract knowledge from it. The need for new information and additional knowledge for better business insight is greater than ever before and the wealth of unstructured information can prove to be of great use in this regard.

So going forward, I see a lot of BI vendors including us to focus a lot more on developing capabilities specific to unstructured analytics.