Businesses need quality insights driven by accurate data, now more than ever. According to Gartner, because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.

SiliconIndia organized the Business Intelligence Conference on Jan 29 in Pune, where the challenges, solutions and future of BI were discussed at length by over 15 experts from the BI industry. The conference kick started with the talk on ‘Is your organization BI ready’ delivered by Amit Aggarwal Senior Technical Architect (BI) from Saama Technologies who spoke about the ways to identify whether the business and IT are BI ready, how to measure the ROI for the BI deployment and the need for BI.

After the discussion about the basic question on the need for BI for any business, the conference moved on to Emerging Trends and Technologies in the Business Intelligence Market and Business Intelligence for the Mobile Workforce. Sharing his thoughts on ‘Business Intelligence for the Mobile Workforce’ Sathesh P Subramaniam, Sr. Solution Architect from Aditi Technologies said “”Business Intelligence is a hot commodity in today’s world and dashboards are the most frequently used method of providing that information. When creating any dashboard, the first rule of thumb should be that the data is the star. Cluttering the screen with unnecessary components will distract from the information displayed, so a KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach is best. You’ll want to strike a balance between making your dashboard attractive enough to hold your audience’s interest, but not so stylized that it obscures the information displayed.”
Speaking on Innovative Data Integration - Foundation for Business Intelligence, Venkatesh Babu, President and CEO, Tiara Consulting said, “Data Integration is the foundation for building BI solutions that enable informed decision making capabilities for any organization.”

Apart from Data integration and its importance for building BI solutions, stressing more on the key drivers for any generic BI solution we had Anand Krishnan, Program Manager from Symphony Services who spoke about the fact that BI programs should move away from tool centricity to analytic framework and look at solutions as a whole.BI solutions in today’s world are both a tactical and a strategic tool. It can be used in a wide ranging applications for example in Pricing and promotion analytics , forecasting and planning applications, shopper analytics , solver and simulation analytics to name a few and going forward the analytic application system will be become the single version of truth. Hence the key drivers for any BI solution should be ‘Speed and Insights to Impact’.

Chetan Manjarekar, VP and BU Head – Strategic Offerings Group, Syntel speaking on Solution Centricity, the Pivot for Successful BI / DW Implementations said “We need to associate the end Business Advantage to the set of key objectives. Understand the decisions and corresponding actions a business will have to take to achieve these objectives. This defines and shapes the solution that we have to deliver. Staying focused on the solution and making it the centre of your universe is Solution Centricity. Let the business solution decide how the DW and BI design evolve. The other way round will create a DW hunting for a solution and lacking on users. Avoid that trap. Across your project’s toll gates one of the consistent checks has to be whether the DW/BI project is still going to deliver the desired solution outcome.”