point
Menu
Magazines
Browse by year:
March - 2011 - issue > CEO Spotlight
BI and Analytics Giving Way to Smarter Business
Rajesh Varrier
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics has stormed into the everyday functioning of an IT organization today. One of the key trends in BI and Analytics is that, the organizations are beginning to understand that BI and Analytics are two sides of the same coin. More and more organizations are seeing the convergence. BI is a lot more than just providing operational and statutory reports. It is about providing business’ deeper insights to understanding performance of their Products, Sales and Marketing programs, understanding their customers better and more.

Advanced analytics are employed to predict outcomes, whether it is of a marketing program or attrition trends within an organization. In other words, it is becoming more imperative that BI organization educate the businesses and enable them on BI, and at the same time enable the BI professionals to know the business better. This will help better alignment and understanding of the demands, faster responsiveness to business.

There are several emerging aspects, like BI in SaaS model or Analytics playing important role, moving from operational to strategic role. Mining of social networks so that we know what the world is thinking about a product, track its trends and where it is going. There is also the interesting aspect of Visualization, a very strong and up coming area. Visualization simply means, how do we turn thousands of rows of organizational information in to visual form so that it improves the decision making process.
The way I see it, evolution of BI/ Analytics is making companies more competitive. It is all about enabling decision making, which is faster, understanding performance of different facets of the business better, so that one can optimize what he needs to do, it is about understanding one’s customers better so that one knows what to sell and when and in this process meet and possibly exceed one’s business goals.

It is an exciting time for entrepreneurs, though they have to face several challenges, especially during the initial years, irrespective of being a product or services firm. The first and foremost challenge is acquiring customers, followed by convincing the investors to believe in their idea and raise money. Then you have the challenge of attracting good talent, who always have the option of joining bigger proven firms.

These challenges do not get any smaller with time, they continue. Only difference is that when you are small company, you have limited resources to battle on these fronts, as you grow bigger you have more resource (people and money) to help battle all these fronts.

Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
facebook