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The concept of business intelligence or BI has changed over the years. From an add-on concept, BI is now an important business application tool for enterprises. Kaushik Bagchi, Country Manager, Information Management, IBM India, explains BI trends and more in an interview with S. Raghottam. 
Excerpts
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1. How is Business Intelligence (BI) today different from what it was a few years ago?
If you look at where BI was, say 8-9 years ago, and where it is now, there are key transitions that have happened. Fundamentally, two things: one is the infrastructure for and access to BI within enterprises; two, how it is viewed and used today.
Earlier, BI was for a small number of people – designated business analysts – who would get the data down from the data warehouse, analyze it, and give recommendations to key decision-makers. The decision-makers couldn’t work with BI and were dependent on what the business analysts told them. So, BI was analyst-driven. It was not real-time, because the analysts worked with historical data. Moreover, there was also a time lag between when they conducted their analyses and when the decision-maker got their recommendations.
Since then, connectivity has gotten better. With it, BI has come to be used on a self-service mode. Decision-makers pull the data and analyses themselves. Access to information or reporting is broad-based, enterprise-wide. So, there is mass adoption of BI.
Earlier BI was seen as an advanced MIS. People would think: I will put all the information in one place and run analytics on it. Reporting is still centralized, but access is broad-based. BI is today used for business-driven trend analysis and forecasting. Embedded or inline analytics is used by a large number of people within an enterprise for functional, day-to-day decision-making. Higher level analytics such as data mining, etc., will still be centralized. So, BI has branched into operational BI and highly analytical BI.
For Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to be successful, information-on-demand from all sources is necessary. And for information-as-a-service to be available, BI is necessary. The industry is also moving from traditional warehousing to real-time warehousing. The nature of warehousing is different for historical data and for real-time application. The query mix changes. Real-time will need to be able to handle simple, complex and ad-hoc queries. It will also need to capture and analyze unstructured data.
2. Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) are increasingly being targeted by BI vendors. How can SMBs benefit from BI?
The SMB market overall is very large and these businesses are growing rapidly which leads to intense competition among the SMBs. So they find it necessary to differentiate from competition. And BI helps them achieve that differentiation. Over the last few years, SMBs have invested in transactional systems such as ERP and SCM and gained operational efficiencies. But so have their competitors. So, what can they do next to gain competitive advantage? They have the data from the transactional systems. Analytics will give them that competitive advantage.
The key challenge for SMBs in deploying BI has been complexity. They have to get the server, storage and DW software from multiple vendors and get somebody else to integrate all of them. Then, to maintain that system and derive benefit from it, they have to deploy high-end human resources. So, it is complex, and takes effort and money. IBM has a motto: make BI simple for the SMB. That’s where the Balanced Configuration Unit comes into the picture. What we have done is to put together server, storage and software – including a common operating system, the DW software and reporting software from our partners – into a pre-loaded, pre-configured package and pre-tuned it for maximum BI performance. We have taken the complexity out of BI deployment in order to drive SMB adoption of BI.
What are some of the broad trends in BI?
The costs of BI haven’t changed. What has happened is that enterprises can look at deploying point analytical applications on the highest impact business areas for highest ROI. Anti-money laundering, Basel, etc., are examples of such priority areas. The top trends in BI are inline analytics, point applications, enterprise data warehousing, and dashboards. Next generation BI will be characterized by connectivity across applications, and putting more analytics into functional areas.
BFSI, telecom, retail are the big adopters of BI. They are now looking at delivering on complex and simple query loads. I believe government will constitute another wave of BI deployment. Manufacturing sector might choose to deploy functional analytics to start with.
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