While BI has been getting wider acceptance across businesses and enterprises, it time to further gain value from the data and empower the decision-makers as well as users with user-driven BI By Jasmine Desai
Over the years, BI has evolved from its basic role of offering business insights to understanding behavior of users and consumers helping businesses and organizations in a far more comprehensive way than ever before. Interestingly, today user-driven BI remains very strategic and vital for range of businesses right from e-commerce companies to automotive manufacturers and many others.
For instance, India’s leading automotive manufacturer Tata Motors is one an example that has been harnessing the power of BI for its complex nature of business that includes business to business (B2B), business to consumers (B2C) and a mix of both – B2B and B2C. In simple terms, the company manufactures commercial vehicles that are sold to dealers and these dealer again sell those vehicles to to customers through touch-points .
Giving count on the BI usage, Jagdish Belval, CIO, Tata Motors, says, 典here are around 20,000 BI users in Tata Motors. There is organizational complexity with material movement of Rs.150-200 crore and there are systems capturing this data. Solid baby steps are needed and it becomes very important for business to forecast what we will sell and where.
Besides, there is a good amount of data lying with truckers in their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Tata Motors has added a new exchange business in cars, which has further added data to its existing data history lying with the organization.
With such a huge amount of data, along with BI tools and other applications around, today enterprises and organizations are looking at ways to enhance workforce mobility and provide them with anytime, anywhere access to data assets which enables mature and quick decision-making.
The BI market is growing at an unprecedented rate and the market is expected to reach $17.1 billion by 2016. For software vendors the BI market is going through enormous growth on one side, while on the other side businesses are striving to build BI infrastructure that is user-driven, collaborative and open for all rather than being selective to just the top level.
User-driven BI against traditional BI
Sumanth Tarigopula, Vice President, Apps Global Delivery India, Enterprise Services, HP India, says, traditional BI will provide data in a predefined format but with a limitation on the scope of analysis whereas user-driven BI will provide an environment wherein users can play around with their own rules and analysis. These users will be more interested in raw metrics in addition to colorful scorecards and dashboards for presentation.
Thus, its a need for enterprises today to have a user-driven BI approach that help all its employees make decisions based on insight from multiple sources. On the role of BI, Phillip Beniac, Regional Vice President, APAC, QlikTech, stresses, at its very heart, BI software should be able to give decision makers the ability to harness data to get insights and come to a meaningful conclusion. In this fast-paced, ever-changing business landscape, winning organizations will be those who provide users the access to systems to allow them explore information in real-time, so they can collaborate and make informed decisions in accordance with market dynamics.”
More organizations are building diagnostic analytics that leverage critical capabilities such as interactive visualization to enable users to drill more easily into the data to discover new insights, according to Gartner.
User-driven BI offers simplicity and openness
The traditional BI is connected with ERP systems where the cable structure is very complex, whereas in user-driven BI, the data model and architecture is more in a simplified manner.
The application architecture in the traditional format provides user with only presentation layer, while in the user-driven, there’s more for the user both on the presentation and middleware layers allowing a deeper insight of data, leading to better decision-making. There has to be balance between something that users can control and change versus something that they can’t.
In terms of the capabilities that user-driven BI can offer, Qlikview’s Beniac states, “ true user-driven BI solutions should able to give customers the fastest, most intuitive and flexible BI platform. It should able to deliver a consistent, cross-platform experience so that decision makers can become smarter and productive wherever they are. It should embed the associative experience that gives a rich and full business overview.”
In Beniac’s view user-driven BI should be scalable to support thousands of connected users, allowing access to everyone in the organization with one version of the truth. Apart from that, it should have a low total cost of ownership. The most successful user-driven BI is the one that is powerful and flexible enough to let users explore their data down to the most granular level of detail and answer business questions from every angle imaginable,he concludes.
According to Tarigopula, there are multiple ways in which BI self-service can be provisioned. One of the tried and tested way is to create a semantic layer over an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), which abstracts the technical data intricacies yet provides an elementary data model for the end users to find answers to business queries in the form of adhoc reports.
According to Gartner’s Sood, there has to be co-existence with traditional BI reporting and querying tools. Data discovery tools complement these tools and are not a replacement.”
India market and user-driven BI
It’s no secret that BI is growing faster than other areas of the software market. BI and analytics have become critical to filter vast and growing amount of information to find insights and draw decisions in the world of Big Data, which is transforming industries today. The fastest-growing markets for business intelligence and analytics the emerging markets like India. This is stemming from the organizational realization that information is changing the world and every business user is contributing to that transformation.
But what do organization and customers at large prefer? Clients seem to prefer data discovery tools in new requirements due to the ease of use and faster deployment times. As a result, traditional BI vendors are ramping up their capabilities to sell and position their search based , interactive visualization based and mobile BI capabilities in the market,replies Gartner’s Sood.
According to HP’s Tarigopula, over the past few years, India has become a very interesting geography for information management and analytic market. Organizations across the industries are forthcoming to embrace the power of analytics. With many business users having minimum level of technical know-how, the demand for self service in India is very high. Especially with customers, who have used enterprise business applications like ERPs, are comfortable to produce their own reports with minimal help from IT,notes Tarigopula.
Indian organizations need to spend enough time in understanding what they need to measure while creating BI platform. Interestingly, one thing that is positive about Indian users is their interest and eagerness towards learning and doing new things.
jasmine.desai@expressindia.com