Introduction

Business intelligence (BI) is a big buzzword in today’s IT world. It is a concept understood by some, but misunderstood by many.

The purpose of this report is to clarify what BI is and to discuss its main components, present Market scenario in India.

In today’s highly competitive business, the quality and timeliness of business information for an organization is not the choice between profit and loss, it is a question of survival or bankruptcy.

Today’s information environment is forcing organizations to reach for a new level of integrated analytics to stay competitive in the market place. With the integrated analytics, organizations will be able to aggregate, analyze and share information from and with sources inside and outside the organizations. In the future successful organizations will gain sustainable competitive advantage by creating an environment that integrates all analytics across the entire value chain quickly and efficiently.

The market for Business Intelligence tools is still in the development stage. Companies that have implemented applications such as ERP, SCM, CRM etc, often face a situation where they have a huge amount of data and information but no helping tool or clearly defined MAP, which can be put to use for making strategic decisions.

The goal with improving your organization’s business intelligence processes and tools should be to support financial leadership. Before you dig into the details of BI, we therefore hope that this blog can be an important building block for you to help support your corporation’s growth and success.

This means that your BI initiative should be part of a bigger picture, which includes the following objectives:

• Creating a vision for financial leadership
• Coaching the organization to set realistic goals
• Supporting optimal decision making

Good BI tools are needed to improve the decision-making process. Historically (and still true for the vast majority of companies today), companies have spent too much time closing their books and preparing data and financial reports, and too little time on analysis and review. This is causing a disconnect between the analysis and review process and action (decision making).

After having spent the last decade implementing enterprise resource planning software and other solutions that support their operations, companies now have large databases with transactional data sitting in their computer rooms. Thousands of consulting hours and sometimes millions of dollars later, the return-on-investment scorecards range from poor to very good. However, one desire is common across all industries: to be able to quickly and easily analyze the data i.e. financial, operational etc in the corporate databases in order to be able to make more intelligent decisions about the future. Transactional data is good for keeping track of what is happening in an organization, but is not well suited to finding out why things are happening or predicting future performance. In other words, after years of putting potentially valuable data into your corporate databases, it is now time to put the tools in place to get the data out of the same systems and organize it in useful ways to support the decision-making process.