Pervasive Business Intelligence - A Paradigm Shift

CIOs around the world are ranking business intelligence (BI) as the top priority to extend their organization's competitive edge in today's fast paced economic climate. In Asia Pacific, the BI market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.4% from 2005 to 2010, compared to the worldwide growth at 9.5%, according to Gartner.

Globalization, volatile markets, deregulation, intensified competition is increasing the demand for timely and relevant data for effective decision-making across all levels of the organization. Organizations are realizing that all employees in the organization, whether they work in customer service, manufacturing, finance, human resources, or just about any other department, are potential decision makers. Enabling people to make decisions based on real-time conditions is critical to running smarter, more nimble organizations.

According to IDC, a new wave of investment in BI, which began in 2005, is likely to usher in another 15-year growth cycle with the focus of empowering all stakeholders with the right information at the right time using the right tools. In the long term, the BI market is likely to be transformed by the merger of traditional BI and Data warehousing technology with related technology from business process management and search and content analysis markets.

What is pervasive BI?

Traditionally, BI is about churning out chunks of reports, and limited to certain departments or functions. A select group of business people would then go through the reports, identify corrective measures and make business forecasts. However, such "post mortem" exercises do not allow optimization of revenue opportunities.

Pervasive BI is about making timely information available to all who need to be empowered to make the right decisions, rather than forcing users to review long reports or query millions of records. This is only possible when BI systems are embedded in business workflows and applications, and people in the organization are provided with relevant, complete information tailored to their role. When real-time intelligence delivers facts and insights that predict the best next step, people are then able to optimize decisions, actions and customer interactions to influence the business outcome.

For example, a call center of a bank with successful BI implementation receives a call from a customer to enquire about home loans. The call center operator can immediately pull out the customer information to determine the past banking activity with this customer. Subsequently, the operator will decide how to respond with the right information in line with this customer's needs. At the same time, the operator can also determine whether there are other up-sell or cross-sell opportunities for this customer.

In another example, a credit card company that has successfully integrated BI into its business processes can monitor card activities in real-time. If a card gets stolen and used fraudulently, the BI system will immediately raise alerts to the appropriate personnel on any anomalies in spending activity. This will allow the credit card company to swiftly take the appropriate preventive actions.

When employees are equipped with timely and relevant insights, they are able to make the right decision where it has the most impact. Becoming an insight-driven enterprise will drive the next level of value creation and competitive advantage for organizations.

Empowering All Users - Not Just a Few

To effectively extend BI to all users, including partners and customers, organizations must first understand the various types of users and their respective needs.

Executives, as a group of users, have the broadest requirements from analytics. They want a complete view of the internal operations and external competitive factors, all consolidated into a concise set of metrics organized around their key performance indicators, or KPIs, at the corporate level. For example, a CEO can monitor all the key revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction, and productivity metrics through an easy-to-use BI dashboard.

The management group of users is focused around the KPIs for a line of business or region. An example would be the Regional Branch Manager who uses analytics to make sure they are servicing their customers and capturing the right up-sell and cross-sell opportunities resulting from the high level of service.

The employee group is typically the individual or front line worker with specific functional responsibilities. An example would be a financial advisor or investment banker using a specific set of analytical reports to obtain the status of all their relationships in aggregate, and also allowing them to view each customer relationship individually.

Partners require a specific set of analytics focused around multi-organization initiatives. An example of this would be an insurance broker being able to monitor, track, and plan their book-of-business with a particular carrier through the use of analytics.

Finally, customers require a very concise set of analytics highly focused around their relationship with an organisation. Although each of the previous groups has a strong customer focus in their analytics, it is the end user who is most likely to take action based on the information presented to them. For example, the end user can use BI to track investment performance and manage their accounts.

 Is India Ready ?

As the fastest growing BI market in the world, India and Asia certainly seem to be making the shift towards enterprise-wide BI. For China Eastern Airline, one of the top three domestic airlines in China, implementing business intelligence helped to extend decision-making across the enterprise. Timely and relevant information across the enterprise provided a better understanding of business operations and enhanced the company's speed in adapting to changes in the marketplace. With a unified information view, China Eastern Airline significantly improved its decision-making process across all levels of the organization, and enhanced corporate performance with complete and accurate analytics.

In India, the early adopters of business intelligence technology have been organizations in the telecom and financial services sectors. Banking has been a major growth driver due to Basel II compliance and increasing competition, which is forcing banks to focus on customer analytics, services and fraud management. The boom in knowledge process outsourcing centers, IT enabled services companies and the retail sector will also see a demand for BI rise in the country.

A Paradigm Shift

Organizations need a paradigm shift in the way they approach BI. The convergence of analytics and transactional systems means that BI is no longer confined to specialized departments or the traditional "power" users such as business analysts and executives.

For organizations looking to optimize revenues through customer service improvements, process effectiveness and efficiency, pervasive BI may be the key to gain complete and timely insight, and drive more effective decisions across all levels of the organization.

The author is Vice President - Technology Sales, Oracle India