NEW DELHI, INDIA: As the world becomes knowledge driven, data is the new raw material for business. The amount of data being collected worldwide is multiplying ten times every year. The huge amount of data generated yields a great business opportunity – managing it to generate revenue – for emerging countries. Most of the organizations cannot survive if they do not know how to correctly use this raw material.

The top strategic technology investment over the next five years at outperforming mid-size organizations is business analytics, projects a recent study of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) by IBM.

The need for analytics has resulted in the drive for outsourced analytics services, which hitherto has been driven by the need to offshore knowledge-based processes to take advantage of labor arbitrage and availability of specialist professional skills in countries like India. Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) is slowly giving way to Analytics Outsourcing (AO).

NASSCOM’s BPO Strategy Summit 2011 addressed Analytics Outsourcing at a session titled, ‘Playing With Big Data for Bigger Business Returns’. Roopa Kudva, MD and CEO, CRISIL and Pramod Bhasin, vice chairman, Genpact were the speakers of this session.

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Kudva spoke about the strategic issues for business leaders as they look into tapping this opportunity.

She said, “Technology, understanding the high-end complex programming, processing capacity to carry data, quality and accuracy of data need to be analyzed; data security and privacy should be the utmost priority, regulatory compliance and talent are other pointers.”

“The most essential point is that big data is more of a talent issue than IT issue. This field requires professionals with multifaceted skills such as advanced knowledge of statistical techniques, programming skills, modeling capabilities, understanding business context and consumer insights. However, such talent is not ready made and thus this industry needs to invest heavily in grooming this talent,” added Kudva.

Bhasin articulated, “This is an evolution of BPO into KPO. Understanding the power of analytics is not an option but a necessity. There’s a bunch of other things happening around that makes it even more relevant. For instance, understanding the importance of social media, to completely understand what the customer speaks of on these platforms and then bringing these changes to the market.”

Speaking about the kind of models employed, he added, “Of the kinds of models we employ in this field, 40-50 per cent are project based and the rest are FTE. We’re not that much into outcome based.”