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The Factor Differentiating Successful Companies From Others

Minoo D Dastur
President, COO & Co-Founder-Nihilent Technologies
Monday, February 1, 2016
Minoo D Dastur
On contrary to common perception, Business Intelligence (BI) is not just performed by IT people sitting in huge enterprises, but also by common people in streets to compare prices while shopping. BI is inextricably intertwined with our lives today. We just don't realize it. When you relish a massive discount by booking a hotel room at the last minute after analysing the price, availability and other factors online, your decision is BI driven. Tools and technologies are only enablers.

Online decision support has been the long-standing trend for the past four years, as it has been endowing businesses with relevant information in real time. Be it buyer's position in negotiation, user's behaviour or competition analysis, BI gives the ability to collect data from both within (corporate data sitting in ERPs, financial systems and CRMs) and external to your system (social media) and presents its back. Not merely key words, but BI has developed the capacity to extract actual meaning from text, whether it is from thousands of contracts, emails or long chats.

BI allows venture capitalists and angel investors to assess startups to understand their model and predict their reach & capability, as opposed to the older days when it was just a gamble. The extrapolation is same in large corporates with every new launch of product, service and geography. BI is allowing businesses to take far greater risk with the comfort of knowing that the risk is taken in corroboration with actual data. BI has dramatically reduced the amount of experiment done, the amount of pilot run and the amount of time that elapses while you test it out corporate wide.

Product Optimization

Predictive analytics helps you to connect the dots that you wouldn't normally connect without insight. If a certain strategy is not working, you can roll back to optimize the product by changing the product's parameters, PR, pricing or number of distributors before making any actual loss. Product optimization is emerging into a real-time demand. Data science is about understanding data usage and then might be using programming tools to address that. Since this is about programming, designing & system building, IT consulting firms play a very big role in the area of product optimization currently. However to perfect it, the IT industry has to relearn. Learning something new is easy. But dropping your learning and relearning is a daunting task for professionals. The answer is not hiring youngsters with zero industry knowledge, but motivating people with vast industry knowledge to learn new things in a very short period of time.


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