The findings could not have been more encouraging: To 60 per cent of senior executives and managers the value achieved exceeded the goals, while for more than 12 per cent, BI practices delivered “significantly more” business value than expected.

What contributed to the BI success and business value was an enterprise-wide BI strategy and data repository that had been put in place, plus an aggressive and companywide data quality programme.

BI came in handy for more than half of large and mid-size organisations in respect of at least the six pivotal functions of customer service, sales, marketing, financial fore-casting, operations and budgeting. As many as 58 per cent of those surveyed were already using dashboards, scorecards and other BI-based tools to manage their organisations, while another 30 per cent were planning to adopt such tools within the next three years. To my knowledge, there has been no such survey of the BIQ of India Inc.

In the olden days, each company was supposed to have its own trade secrets. Even today, with all the advanced capabilities of technology, the formulae for Coca-Cola and Pepsi continue to be jealously guarded. Each company’s business strategies and models have their own impact on the market share and customer preference and they, in turn, can make or mar the prospects of other companies in the same or related fields. Tata’s Nano, for instance, can seriously erode the scooter/motor cycle segment.

In the overall context also, touching all sectors of the economy, BI becomes an important determinant of corporate performance as it helps provide leads and clues on emerging needs and demands on which companies are working for opening new businesses, expansion and diversification schemes, the technologies covered by research and development, lines of negotiations for mergers and acquisitions, plans for tapping human, material and financial resources, and the various stages at which these activities are.

I wonder whether BI is taken seriously in corporate entities in India in the sense of setting up a regular in-house intelligence bureau, so to speak, with a special complement of properly trained personnel assigned to it.

At the most, intelligence gathering efforts may be limited to taking note of open sources such as the trade journals, Web sites on the Internet, and the media, or through socialising in clubs and parties.

Persons who had previously occupied important positions in other companies and were privy to sensitive information and data can also be fruitful sources of BI when they take up, or are offered, employment in another company.

I am not even sure whether each company should necessarily have its own separate BI set up and whether it would have enough material to purvey on a sustained basis. Just to justify its existence, it might go in for indiscriminate data mining, and fill data warehouses and marts with stuff of no great relevance.

The best solution may be for some enterprising persons with business savvy and attuned to business environment to establish a Business Intelligence Bureau (BIB) which would take up specific assignments at the behest of business firms to serve their respective fields of interest.

It should not, however, be open to the BIB to follow the techniques used for collecting security intelligence which include planting of spies and double agents, mail interception, wire tapping, and the like. An arrangement like the BIB has become a necessary evil in the race for survival and success.

B. S. R.

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