Sanjay Mehta, CEO of MAIA Intelligence, highlights the barriers preventing IT managers from adopting business intelligence, while delving into its innovations and capabilities. This is an excerpts from an interview taken by N. Geetha, Executive Editor, ITNext and published in October 2011 issue by 9Dot9 Media.

1. BI | COVER STORY
Enlightening
WITH
Intelligence
IT managers grapple with the challenges
of empowering their organisations through
business intelligence solutions
BY N GEE TH A
I MAGI NG BY ANI L T
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2. COVER STORY | BI
Barriers
to Sanjay Mehta, CEO
of MAIA Intelligence, highlights
the barriers preventing IT
managers from adopting business
intelligence, while delving into its
innovations and capabilities
What is the state of adoption of BI by IT heads? of skills internally in the line of business; and the fact that
As Indian companies witness a yearly growth of 25 to 30 per existing cultures do not encourage sharing of information.
cent, the need for business intelligence (BI) tools and ser-
vices to create smarter, more agile and efficient businesses, Elaborate the steps involved in making environment
is increasing. The BI software market is estimated to reach Business Intelligence ready.
$65.4 mn in 2011, up by 15.7 per cent from 2010. There is The prerequisites for a BI deployment are ensuring that data
increased adoption of BI tools across industry verticals, is clean; business users are effectively trained and shortlist-
owing to increased competition and globalisation, which ing and selecting a BI tool which gets deployed quickly
paves way for increased productivity. and is able to adjust as you go. IT managers
should deploy BI with the clear idea that there
What are the barriers to adoption of BI? are numbers out there that they need to find,
Cost and complexity barriers restrict user adop- and know roughly where they might be.
tion and deployment across the enterprise. Data Post-deployment, IT managers should
migration and integration are also the most initially not spend a huge amount of time
potent inhibiting factors to BI adoption. Other upfront developing the perfect reports
challenges are departmental silos, data access, because needs will grow as the business
clean data, employee resistance, lack of busi- evolves. While building a data warehouse,
ness rules, etc. Getting the right data qual- IT managers need to take an integrated
ity and one version of the truth and approach from the beginning
also ineffective data governance and ensure that they are not
are other obstacles to adoption. locking themselves into
Additionally, the take an unworkable data
up of BI is being hindered strategy further down
by: employees resistant the road.
to change; cultural
resistance; lack of Elaborate on the
understanding of BI capabilities of BI
role in improving tools to address
business; lack of vertical-specific
bandwidth due needs.
to competing There are two types
priorities; lack of verticalisation
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3. BI | COVER STORY
happening in the BI space. One “Dirty data should be business knowledge, improved
in consolidation, and the other in work processes and more
terms of industry segments. Both tackled before making effective relationships.
are taking place on the established it ready for BI, as this
grounds that BI verticalisation What steps need to be taken to
does not make sense for a few may drastically affect t manage workflow smartly?
generics. Financial consolidation business profitability” t Organisations must understand
is seeing many knitted BI solutions and address critical challenges
coming its way. Due to heavy M&A —Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence to manage workflow smartly in
activity and a stricter regulatory a BI environment. The BI proj-
environment, all branches, subsidiaries and sister concerns ect has to be recognised as a cross-organisational business
of organisations have to have some common financial bind- initiative and it needs to be understood that, as such, it dif-
ing. That is where BI is capturing the screen space. The other fers from typical standalone solutions. The project should
area is amongst industries such as BFSI, pharmaceuticals and follow a breakdown structure and a methodology. Business
telcos, and a few others where templates are generated. Indus- requirements should be analysed and business activities
tries like manufacturing, BFSI, pharma and healthcare, logis- standardised. Dirty data should be tackled before making
tics and retail are some of the early adopters of BI in India. it ready for BI, as this may drastically affect business profit-
ability. The necessity for and the use of meta-data should
What kind of profit opportunities and productivity gains also be understood well.
has this created for IT managers?
BI resolves reporting challenges such as creating one ver- Is consumerisation of BI for real? How?
sion of the truth, enables information self-service and cre- BI is still too elitist and growing too slow. Currently, it is
ates meaningful data rollups for users. It also seamlessly in the corporate arena and needs to move to the consumer
integrates changes to business and consolidates multiple arena. How can we change this paradigm? How can BI
systems across the enterprise. affect consumers’ daily lives and affect decision-making
as it does with internet searches or in the way Web 2.0 is
What are the top trends that you see in the BI space? doing? How can BI become a utility for decision-making
Quite a few trends like self-service, real-time analytics, on- with consumer BI applications being developed? Currently,
the-go data visualisation and business intelligence through our decisions are based on opinions, recommendations,
mobile platforms are shaping up in BI space. All types of advertisements and surveys and not actual data, which is
critical decisions – buying, selling, monitoring and optimis- measured or analysed. BI can drive consumerisation if seg-
ing – are being made on the fly. BI on rich internet appli- ments across the enterprise rely on their own internal data
cation (RIA) technology is evolving; mobility will be an to set goals.
important trend to deliver information on PDAs. The tool
has the capability to send the report figures through What innovations do you observe in BI?
an SMS gateway. We have already started exploring the Web 2.0-
based technology wave of RIA-based BI. Busi-
What kind of business benefits have you ness users had never experienced this kind
observed using BI tools? of intuitive GUI before. They loved this
Some of the business benefits gained by kind of sexy-looking dashboard dancing
our customers include regulatory and to their whims and fancies.
compliance adherence, enhanced sales
revenue by identifying cross-sell and What are your plans for BI?
up-sell opportunities, better and clearer up in 2011 in Our effort is to create something that is:
assessment of non-financial revenue and BI market over • Simple: The right interfaces for the right
costs and an increase in IT and business people at the right time
process productivity. IT managers have saved
2010 • Seamless: Tightly integrated with data
–Gartner
costs through building reports into the core sources, applications and business processes
business application (transaction reporting) and • Social: Allows people to collaborate around
focussing more on the core development of other analysing information and making decisions
productive applications rather than allotting time • Strategic: Closes the loop between strategy and
to the frequent report requests from the business execution
users across their organisations. The roadmap for the future is on-demand BI and
Intangible benefits accrued through BI are embedded Business Intelligence.
performance improvement, time savings, greater
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