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BI going to be more mobile

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CIOL Bureau
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Sudipta SenWith 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.

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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.

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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.

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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?  

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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.

 

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CIOL: To what extent is enterprise search helpful in data access and utilization, and what are its constraints?      

SS: We believe that as the reporting needs of an organization grow, the capability to provide free form text searching can provide users with accurate information without having to search through a maze of reports to get the relevant information.

SAS has announced a partnership with Google as of April last year to provide the familiar Google search interface to connect business users directly to the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform. Users of all skill levels will be able to search SAS and get real-time information, including data, analyses and reports, directly in Google search results pages.

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CIOL: What are the most critical components to be considered in BI?

SS: Successful companies recognize that BI as more than technology, and this is where people, process and culture come in to play. Do you have people who are committed to fact based decision making? Do you have processes in place to make data readily available? Do you have a culture that's going to take on the change necessary to adopt a culture of fact-based decision making? Most importantly, does an organization accept change only or does it also embrace it? Companies who are able to harness data and commit to fact-based decision making are the ones that are going to be quicker in market and ultimately have competitive advantage.

CIOL: Now that, you have come out as a leader in BI space, tell us about your key products?   

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SS: SAS solution portfolio is rich and is backed by our 30 years of experience of dealing with our customer across the segments. Not only we provide strong intelligence foundation in form of our enterprise intelligence platforms, we also provide various functional solutions like financial intelligence (deals with challenges like Consolidation & Reporting, Budgeting and Planning, Strategic Performance Management, Activity Based Management etc); customer intelligence (addresses issues like customer segmentation, churn management, cross-sell/up-sell, customer profitability etc); risk intelligence (BASEL II, AML etc); manufacturing intelligence (enabling organizations in areas of warranty analysis, service part optimization, production quality etc). On top of our functional solutions, we have customized industry frameworks for 16 industry verticals, which reduce time to intelligence for our customers.

CIOL: How did you manage to get leadership in BI software market?        

SS: SAS has always been a leader in the business intelligence and analytics space. We are very happy to be again recognized as the leader in the business intelligence applications market. Our unabated growth demonstrates that customers are demanding proven solutions from stable partner which focuses on delivering business value to them.

CIOL: What trends do you foresee for BI in the future? 

SS: The future of BI involves things like consistency of information across the organization and predictive analytics that will support proactive decision making. Combine this with some of the technology developments and infrastructure issues that are taking place around us globally. Wi-Fi is becoming prevalent, for example. So, a user is not going to be tethered to his desk. BI already is mobile, but is going to become even more mobile, and people are going to be comfortable with it. Therefore, the opportunity to get BI closer to the point of interaction will be realized.

Secondly, organisations will increasingly move away from transactional database systems to implement fully integrated enterprise intelligence platforms that can efficiently disseminate intelligence across the organizations. Just as an ERP platform is needed for the operational side of the business, an enterprise intelligence platform with all componenets fully integrated is and will continue to be needed for the intelligence side of the business.

Thirdly, organisations will increasingly demand industry solutions – from telecom to banking to manufacturing that will be at the heart of their enterprise intelligence strategies.