With wireless technologies like Wi-Fi becoming prevalent, BI that is already mobile, is destined to be more mobile, says Sudipta K. Sen, CEO & manging director, SAS Institute (India). He spoke about current trends in business intelligence in an interview with Rashmi Shrikant, Content Editor, CIOL.

CIOL: What is the significance of business intelligence (BI) in an enterprise in the current global scene?

Sudipta Sen: The Indian Industry is going through a phase of tremendous growth, and enterprises are growing either organically or are expanding their customer base through mergers and acquisitions. In a scenario of mergers/acquisitions, companies face challenges of managing growth, managing profitability, delivering superior customer service and adhering to regulatory compliances.

True BI solutions have tremendous potential to deliver right value and provide required enterprise intelligence to organizations to effectively address the above mentioned challenges.

CIOL:With disparate systems and information islands being by-products of growth, what role does BI has to play?        

SS: Organizations, over a period of time, have built huge information within their enterprises. This information is existing in various departments, systems, etc. Information is a great organizational asset if leveraged correctly.

BI is a process of transforming this information into intelligence, which can fuel innovation and help organizations succeed in today's competitive environment. Right deployment of BI solutions can not only help organizations to understand various events like "What happened, Why it happened", etc., i.e., hindsight and insight information, but more importantly provide predictive analysis and help them in gaining critical foresight capabilities like "What can happen or What best can happen", which is a great differentiating factor in today's environment.

There are four key building blocks for effectively creating enterprise intelligence within an organization, i.e., data integration, intelligence storage, analytics and business intelligence.

Data integration helps in integrating and cleaning data, which exists across various disparate systems in various forms -- structured and unstructured. Once the data is cleansed and standardized, it is important to manage or stage that data on a right storage platform, which is optimized for supporting advanced analytics. Once the data has been staged, it is important for an organization to perform various analytical functions/models for deriving the required intelligence, which in turn can be shared in form of BI to various stakeholders.

CIOL: Can you highlight some of the current trends in the BI space?  

SS: In the past, many companies kept BI applications locked away inside IT departments or in the hands of business analysts. By contrast, today's BI solutions span the entire breadth of a company. From the supply side to the customer side and everything in between, BI now reaches every functional area within an organization.

Likewise, decision making now transcends all organizational levels. With interfaces that can be tailored for each user's needs, employees can become more efficient, and top executives can spend less time reacting to tactical issues and more time in driving strategic goals.