 Soumendra Mohanty, Lead, Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Practice, Accenture India
In an interview with Network Computing, Soumendra Mohanty, Lead, Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Practice, Accenture India spoke on the technology, deployment and usage trends in Business Intelligence (BI).
1. How have enterprises approached Business Intelligence (BI)?
BI has always been helping enterprises understand how they have performed, gain insights from historical data and help formulate certain strategic initiatives on a futuristic mode. While this aspect of BI is widely accepted, today enterprises are challenged to get insights into what is happening now and how they can apply historical learning to influence current trends. Most of the BI deployments today are driven by the need to get an enterprise view across business functions.
However, the expectation from the user community is changing rapidly. Increasingly, users are asking for assurance around data quality, data in real time, integrating structured and unstructured data, real time data analytics, etc. These aspects will severely challenge the vendor tools maturity levels as well as infrastructure related needs.
2. Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) are starting to implement basic ERP now. How can BI help them?
ERP implementations ensure that businesses run in a coherent manner and are more focused on operational aspects. The transactions that happen through ERP systems need to be analyzed for trending analysis, performance improvement aspects, etc – this is where BI comes into play. Most of the ERP packages have started offering BI as part of the box. Examples like SAP BW, Siebel Analytics, Oracle BI, etc.
3. Is BI an enterprise system that does analytics and helps make profits? Or, is it an enterprise system embedded in business processes and systems? Or, is it all of these and more?
Accenture looks at BI as a means to achieve the much broader perspective of Information Management which includes traditional DW and BI, Data Management & Architecture and Portals & Content Management. Ideally, Information Management should not only provide insight into an enterprise’ past performance and help articulate the next strategies but at the same time, be able to monitor operational aspects and provide means to rectify the anomalies with a business context. In summary, BI should be both "out process" as well as "in process".
4. Has BI implementation become more complex or less so? Has usage become easier, and if it has what factors have made it so?
Certain factors like data explosion, distributed user bases, global business processes and increasing expectations from C level executives are challenging the traditional BI implementation aspects. It is beginning to become complex as well as costly. Availability of skilled resources as well as mergers and acquisitions in the BI vendor space is also making the whole BI landscape more challenging. At the same time, there is an overall attempt across vendors to make the tools more intuitive and easier to use.
Secondly, the most challenging part of any BI solution is requirements. Business users today have become wiser in terms of articulating what they need; hence BI solutions have gained a better acceptability than few years back. Certain packaged BI solutions come with industry standard data models, reports templates, etc which has cut down the development life cycles.
Third, traditional BI i.e. insight into how enterprises have performed has figured prominently on CIOs priority. However, for long, the means to achieve this was not straightforward and hence the impact was not noteworthy. Additionally, there were question marks with regard to the cost of implementation, availability of skilled resources and assurance of data quality.
The situation though has changed today. Competitive pressure, control on operational costs, safe guarding bottom lines require insight into business performance and ability to correct the trouble areas. More and more companies are getting into predictive analytics, customer centricity, etc. These cannot be achieved without a robust and scalable BI solution. In a nutshell, businesses and CIOs can't afford to wait.
5. How have the early adopters of BI like BFSI and Telcos using BI today?
In the early days of BI usage and adoption, BFSI and Telcos focused more on getting to an enterprise wide single source of truth and attain consistency for operational reports. Today these industries have moved to customer centricity and predictive modeling.
New industries embracing BI on a large scale are retail industry, health care, energy sector. Wherever customer centricity is required, BI provides the distinct advantage.
6. What are the various uses that BI solutions are being put to?
Range of BI solutions can be broader; for example, Standard Reporting - Catering to what has happened; ad hoc reporting - catering to how many, how often; What type of queries, query/drill down - catering to find what exactly is the problem; Alerts - what actions are needed; Statistical analysis - what is happening; forecasting/extrapolation - what if these trends continue, predictive modeling - what will happen next; Optimization - what's the best that can happen?
Enterprises have understood the importance of understanding the past performance and reactive analytics; now they want to get into a predictive mode so that they will be able to control key business events real time.
7. What is the evolution that has taken place in terms of BI infrastructure?
Data explosion and demand for SOA based enterprise solutions has been challenging the infrastructure requirements. Post 9/11 also resulted in more focus on business continuity. Other aspects like data privacy, security and compliance related requirements are putting more pressure on infrastructure needs.
The industry is moving towards operational BI where the intention is to make the power of BI available at the ground level as well. SOA is going to play a larger role in making operational BI a reality. At Accenture we are pioneering on SOA concepts and implementations. Going forward, Web Services, ETL, EAI, BPM, EDM all are going to be part of the SOA framework, complex yet well orchestrated solutions to clients. Accenture as part of its Information Management Services focus area is investing heavily in this space. Some of the assets we have created have started giving significant outcomes to our clients.
8. When did Accenture start its BI practice?
Accenture started its BI practice 15 years back. Since then, the practice has grown to 10000+ resources worldwide with a focus on robust methodology and best practices. We are currently positioned as leaders in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. We will continue to be on aggressive growth agenda, create more offerings around strategic area like MDM, DM&A, Data enrichment and analytics services, etc. We have a wide range of solution offerings and engagement modes to cater to client's needs.
By S Raghotham
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