The Hindu Business Line : Setting the stage

`Business intelligence,' which helps companies to extract key information from a mountain of data, is set to make its presence felt in India. Here's more on it.

IF you think the concept of `business intelligence' and its tools — such as data mining and statistical analysis — only help rich corporations to get richer, here's some interesting news.

Progressive governments across the globe are using the concept to reach out to citizens. The UK Government, for instance, uses it to monitor unemployment rates in the country, track job opportunities and generally make the local employment exchange more proactive.

Ambulance dispatch systems and monitoring/operations of traffic lights are just some `real-world' applications where business intelligence software is being used these days.

In the scenario of the call centre industry, a business intelligence tool can help a company to improve employee productivity. For instance, the company can monitor the time taken for a call centre executive to handle a customer call, see if the query could have been routed through an IVRS (interactive voice response system) and route more complex calls to the executive.

Further, if the customer is a regular caller, then his likes/dislikes could be traced with the help of data analysis and the information could be used to provide better service to the customer by the banking or retail client which has outsourced the work to the call centre.

Simply put, the business intelligence concept helps a company to use and analyse available data to understand what makes it tick and predict the future effect of existing decisions. And a `BI system' could be anything from customer profiling, inventory movement, medical research, market segmentation and product profitability. In such a system, data is extracted from diverse applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) the HR database, and the billing systems. It is then loaded into a data warehouse after being formatted. After that, information is culled from the data warehouse through tools such as data mining, statistical analysis applications and reporting applications. Broadly, business intelligence can be termed as an assortment of applications and technologies that could include decision support systems, online analytical processing (OLAP) and forecasting.

Given the tremendous utility of this concept and its tools, their adoption in India is still nascent given the high investment costs involved in incorporating them as part of the enterprise. On an average, a small module of a BI system could range between Rs 8 lakh and Rs 10 lakh, with a full-scale implementation going upwards of Rs 1 crore.

"We consider India and China to be the biggest markets for business intelligence solutions in the Asia-Pacific," says Nicholas Goode, Vice-President, Product Management Information Delivery, Product Group, Business Objects.

According to IDC, the Indian market is valued at $85 million in 2004 with a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 26 per cent. Aware of this huge opportunity, Business Objects has already started marketing its business intelligence products in India through its partnership network and plans to expand this over the coming years.

India already has BI vendors offering products for users that range from large enterprises to SME segments. Internationally, top BI vendors include Hummingbird, Lotus Development, Business Objects and Cognos Corp.

According to Goode, the business intelligence concept has found application in such varied areas as criminal investigation and manufacturing. He expects the scope of its applications to increase "given the tremendous data which flows every day. Business Objects provides non-technical business users with the ability to access, analyse and share information from different sources," says Goode.

Perhaps it is this vast potential offered by this concept that has Business Objects planning to make its upcoming versions of Business Object BI products available on Microsoft products, in particular the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET. Besides this, Business Objects plans to drive the standardisation effort of business intelligence here in India and abroad through its competency centres.

"In mature markets such as the US and the UK, enterprises are already starting to realise the importance of standardisation. This will help to align disparate systems and for now we are conducting this in our competency centres," says Goode.

So with regulatory compliances for norms like Basel II, Sorbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and THREAD making it imperative for enterprises to implement business intelligence tools, it now remains to be seen how fast India moves up the BI adoption ladder.

preetim@thehindu.co.in

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