August 1, 2008
BI in Times of Inflation and Competition

Competitive pressures across industry sectors have increased manifold today. Companies need to be extremely cost-competitive and know their own strengths, weaknesses and the market really well to be able to gain a competitive edge. Business Intelligence (BI) can help companies in keeping track of their core business indices and get a feel of their businesses on a daily basis.

These are turbulent times for availing corporate credit, given the escalating inflation and interest rates that keep inching up every now and then. India's headline inflation is now more than 11.6% as per the latest data available and fears are it may touch 13% soon. Businesses are facing an unprecedented rise in the cost of availing credit as banks raise their interest rates for lending across the board including corporate lending. Although inflationary trends and the subsequent monetary tightening by the central bank are primary reasons for banks raising interest rates, delinquency rates are often on the minds of banking leaders.

Competitive pressures across industry sectors have increased manifold today. Companies need to be extremely cost-competitive and know their own strengths, weaknesses, and the market really well to be able to gain a competitive edge. BI can help companies in keeping track of their core business indices and get a feel of their businesses on a daily basis.

Operational business intelligence is the latest BI trend that helps organizations keep track of key performance indicators on a daily basis. It also helps resolve customer complaints and problem events quickly as operational BI pulls out data almost in real-time. Traditional BI on the other hand is more suited to preparation of time-consuming analytical reports.

Banks, telcos, and other service companies often face a situation where there is no integration between two departments of the same organization, because sharing of data is minimal or non-existent. Data exists in closed silos across various systems that are not integrated, as these were implemented years ago. There is a separate data recovery system for each database residing on different systems, so data sharing between two critical departments of the same organization does not happen. Obviously the possible synergies are lost and so is the ability to better serve the customer.

Banks often talk about providing a single view to the customer, regardless of the number of applications deployed internally. However, they would do well to gain a single view of the enormous data residing on their systems themselves.

Imagine a bank agent calling up a savings account holder of his own bank without knowing he also holds a credit card of the same bank. If there was more transparency in information between the credit cards and deposits departments of banks, it would serve the customer better by enabling a better understanding of her profile.

Operational BI seeks to address daily problems besides assessing KPIs for long-term business strategy. While operational BI is nothing new, recent trends such as live operational reporting and enterprise information integration that provides a single view of data residing across various legacy applications has improved the portfolio of offerings. Organizations would be well-served in trying some data integration and doing business intelligently.

By Tabrez Khan
CXOtoday.com