Changing BI Paradigm - is your enterprise ready for it?

Business intelligence landscape is fast changing and is predicted to be completely different in the next 5 years. The paradigm is changing, from a point base BI Tool to enabling an insight driven enterprise. The next level of competitive advantage for enterprise will be determined by, 'How effectively can they derive insight and value from the existing investment in the large volumes of data.'

A CIO is increasingly looking for a solution that enables pervasive business Insight, Supports growth and change and ensures compliance and mitigate Risk to name a few.

Some of the business imperatives and challenges that are accelerating this shift can be enumerated as:


• BI Architecture complexity, leading to fragmented data and disaggregate view of metrics. It does not help the cause that these metrics are dispersed over many BI tools, many corporate data sources, and many competitive information sources.


• Explosion in data volumes dispersed over many core applications like CRM, ERP, SCM, and HR to list a few.


• With disparate and fragmented systems it can be quiet a challenge to get a 'Unified view of enterprise metrics' . Pronto answering questions like 'What is my Customer X's lifetime value', 'How profitable is my Brand A Business?' can be quiet a challenge.


• Plugging the gap between strategic imperatives, management KPIs and operational goals. How does a strategist drive operational metrics from strategic analysis tools? The legacy today is that most of the strategist use point based solutions / tools for analysis and use traditional methods of phone / email to drive actions. With the accelerated pace of business this has become a handicap to conducting business effectively.


• Getting timely, in-context information to make critical decisions. For effective decision making it is important that while historical information is available, real time data is also available for collaboration.

These challenges could determine the next make or break business opportunity. How do you get your enterprise to be an 'Insight driven enterprise'. An enterprise that has enabled the following dimensions in its enterprise via an effective business intelligence solution is on the threshold of leveraging information for business gains.


• Dimension I : Gaining 'Pervasive Business insight'.


• Dimension II : 'Pervasive insight embedded in the Business process'


• Dimension II: 'Insight based Partnerships'.


• Dimension IV: 'Adoption of Proven insight'.

In the following section let us have a brief look at what this may mean to your organization at a solution level and tool level.

I) Pervasive Business insight

Pervasive insight within the enterprise, implies

• Insight delivered to everyone in the organization, who needs the information, to make any role or function based business decision.


• Intelligence is embedded in the daily activities of the enterprise and is not a distinct process.


• Business intelligence is not a distinct process from the operational and Strategic analysis process.


• It is part of the business workflow.


• It is actionable information.


• It is personalized to the roles and function of the person using it.

Enabling technology for this will be one that will have an immediate intuitive interface, A common enterprise information model, Compliance with service oriented architecture and a scalable infrastructure to list a few must haves.

Common enterprise information model is emerging to be a very important framework requirement, and its importance cannot be emphasized enough. To answer cross function and cross system questions like 'What is customer X's lifetime value for my enterprise' , it is important to have one enterprise definition for 'lifetime value of a customer' .

II) Pervasive insight embedded in the business process

To be able to translate manual interventions in a business process with automatic decision making process, is giving embedding insight within a business process. Today there are standard and technology available to achieve this. With BPEL it is feasible to embed intelligence in the various business process to be able to automate parts or complete workflow. Insight driven process reduces manual interventions, provides process monitoring and creates a new level of agility in the organization.

It is important that the enabling technology of choice should be able to

• Expose the full business intelligence as a web service.

• Use a real time business monitoring tool for process monitoring.

III) Insight driven partnerships

To be able to leverage the potential of pervasive intelligence it is important to extend the enterprise eco system to partners. This will help the enterprise to create value and insight across the complete value chain.

It is important that tool of choice allows you to derive insight from a combination of data sources and is able to support integrated and seamless security model respecting an effective firewall between the partner data. For e.g. Demand planners will be able to make much more effective decisions if they have visibility of the entire value chain, within the enterprise and extended enterprise.

IV) Adopt Proven insight

Not everything needs to be created from a scratch, there are many industry best-practices that are available which can be leveraged for standards functions in the enterprise. To blend template best-practice with in-house developments allow you to have a low TCO and reduce the deployment time. Time to value is faster.

Putting it all together than , the reality of business today in context of business intelligence is that we have spend at least half a decade in spurning our operational system, generating large volumes of data. The competitive dynamic is changing so fast that it is important to be able to derive intelligence from this fragmented, multi system data source. It is important that an insight driven enterprise is created which is able to leverage the data to gain insight into the business at different levels of operations, that includes the processes in place too.

Business Intelligence should be Pervasively deployed beyond the typical business analyst and executive users to every decision points in the enterprise. These decision points can be people or processes.

Business processes are driven for performance optimization.

Heterogeneous customer requirements are efficiently serviced and guided analysis delivered to enable a 'Discovery to action' analysis.

Many of the standard business functions should be used as pre packaged templates. Availability of role based and industry specific analytic applications.

Decreasing IT Costs through vendor consolidations, will be complimentary to gaining quick integrations.