Editorial

 Back to the future?

 By Sudhir Narasimhan

Some four years ago, we tried following up on how Indian enterprises were using Business Intelligence (BI). We wanted to find out for ourselves whether BI had taken off or whether it was just marketing machineries of vendors on overdrive.

I suppose we were mostly looking for cases where enterprises were putting predictive analytics to use. What we turned up with instead was a story on how telcos were experimenting with BI tools to contain churn. Most enterprises in other industry verticals were still facing mammoth challenges in mining and warehousing their data. Among other things, we also chanced upon a Frost & Sullivan report which had listed the barriers for BI adoption in India, and had predicted that 2008 would be the year when we would get to see some real action in this space.

We are almost there and the hype now is around BI 2.0 or realtime BI. In the meanwhile, adoption of BI among Indian enterprises has picked up. Industries are using BI differently, depending on what their business demands are.

While as end users we are yet to reap its benefits, I learn that there are some banks and also a few telcos who are experimenting with BI tools to improve their customer data quality, so that they can tailor campaigns for individual customers and, in the process, increase the effectiveness of campaigns and conserve on precious marketing rupees.

It’s a no-brainer that BI will significantly add to their business efficiencies once they get their act right. But what they ought to be prepared for are new challenges in terms of increased end-user expectations. The BI systems of tomorrow should be geared up to address these challenges.