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At a time when organizations are craving for security, data and analytics will provide them with the strong foundation and confidence they need to excel with minimized risk CIOs face a huge challenge in convincing their manage­ment to use analytics, especially when there are other ap­plications also running in the organization, as this makes the integration of analytics with the existing applications a difficult task to achieve," says a CIO not wishing to be named. However this is not to say that analytics is an avoided phenomenon in the enterprises. In fact, it's rather the opposite, notwithstanding the initial hurdles associated with its deployment. In the current economic scenario, in­formed decisions often make or break businesses and therefore for businesses it's becoming increasingly imperative that they focus on analytics-driven de­cision support across different facets of their businesses from volatile pools of data from diverse sources, to enable operational decisions to be taken locally.

Moreover globalization and the resultant evolving business models are making a strong case for analytics since it results in data integration, better insights into the business, and faster business decision-making process. The increasing business complexity coupled with growing competition and the commoditization are pressures to balancing multiple business objectives. As per Dhiraj C Rajaram, founder, CEO and chairman, Mu Sigma, the growth of the retail industry is yet another component that has contributed to an increased analytics adoption in India. Organized retail is growing at a rate of 25% and, as a result, there is a lot of data in these organizations that have accumulated over the past few years. A lot of insights from this data would be needed to feed into better assortments, promotions, and retail expansion strategies; thus resulting in the adoption of analytics. He goes on to add that Big Data initiatives in India like the DID project, which is expected to be one of the world's largest databases by fa1; will require a whole lot of ana­lytics from usage, penetration, etc, as its implementation across India gathers momentum. With Gartner estimating the ana­lytics market to be worth $61.2 mn y-o-y, one needs to also remember that this also includes the mainte­nance fee revenue.

Pushing for Analytics

Maneesh Sharma, head, business analytics and technology, SAP India says, "Meeting the market and stakeholder demands for greater predictability cannot be done without embracing analytics that puts the power into the hands of the decision-makers. To get there, IT leaders need to progress faster on the maturity curve, move from relying on analytics to measure the past performance, and enhance the current performance to use it to improve the future performance." notwithstanding the fact that business decisions in India were either gut based or based on the experiences of managers, the de­ployment of analytics has enabled enterprises to make decisions based on intelligent facts, thus resulting in revenue increase and also reduced product cycles. For instance, as a leading name in the e-commerce segment, Indiaplaza.in believes that analytics gives life to an e-commerce entity.

Building a strong case for analytics, K Vaitheeswaran, CEO, Indiaplaza.in says that by nature business intelligence (BI) and ana­lytics are two sides of the same coin, however analytics is used wherein lots of data is generated and meas­ured. "And e-commerce is all about data-driven business running on web wherein anything can be meas­ured. We use analytics in every sin­gle part of the business," he shares. He further adds on to elaborate on the processes wherein analytics finds usage-page upload and the number of HTTP requests. "CSS is used to determine the text and font size used on the page, analytics also helps in forecasting and analyzing which part of the website the user is clicking on, which products are in demand (the average order size), page download speed, click stream data as to wherein the customers are clicking, the product category, delivery schedule, customer query addressal, etc," he lists out.

Since e-commerce is a data­ driven business and analytics is at the core, it cannot alone be a sup­port function servicing data and MIS to heterogeneous and unstructured requirements. Sometimes even strat­egy is subservient to analytics as e-commerce companies allow data to present an independent opinion into any situation, and that which cannot be ignored. In the face of mounting com­petition, there is no shortage of data rather there is an abundance of it. However the challenge is to wean out actionable insights from the same and use it to acquire and retain customers. "While the traditional businesses would use BI to drive operational excellence, for e-commerce BI and analytics drive strategy and planning. Another fac­tor is the sheer abundance of data in e-commerce. With advances in site-analytics, digital marketing, and social media, the amount of data available across umpteen dimen­sions is ultimately hard to ignore," says Sinha. With the change in the market, vendors, says Sharma of SAP, need to understand and address emerging trends in 2 dimensions: technologi­cal innovation (including advanced analytics, such as predictive analyt­ics and text analytics) and busi­ness evolution.

He also says, "The evidence of the competitive value of analytics solutions is growing simply because fact based decision-making is spreading throughout commer­cial, non-profit, and public sector organizations. The volatility in today's envi­ronment is forcing enterprises to re-prioritize their strategic priorities and in most cases this means that organizations have to re-think on the quality and the effectiveness of their decision-making process to ensure that business decisions are informed and made intelligently. Making a case in point Manish Pan­jwani, managing director, technology growth platform, Accenture India informs, " There are a couple of fac­tors that are responsible for analyt­ics uptake. Increasingly, business and governments are moving up the analytics sophistication curve-they are no longer satisfied with simply seeing backward, or at looking profit and loss reporting, or amount spend on vendors or alerts on product shortages by the market.

They want to see real-time performance and profitability analysis, customer behavior modeling, price sensitiv­ity by customer segment; they want insights into the optimal business mix of product, by market, channel, and segment using both internal as well as external data. How do our clients determine the right business problems; what/who/how and where to address them and how to achieve the optimal outputs in the right context, at the right time, for the best business outcomes?" Advocating for business analyt­ics, Arun Ramachandran, country manager; data computing division, EMC India and Saarc says, "It helps organizations better understand their environment, anticipate trends bettel; and provide greater insights to help make decision-making easier and objective. Increasing competi­tion in a flat world, reduced margin for error; and the increased demand for differentiation have prompted IT businesses the world over to provide more intelligent and customized solutions to their customers in retail, banking, consumer services, FMCG, telecom, etc. This is a key reason why there is more focus on analytics by IT companies."

Clearly, there is a perceptible shift from a single-window view of business to a 360-degree view of business-enterprises focus on key questions about managing overall business performance; embedding analytical processes; and adopting analytical, skill-based orientation for their people. These are some of the questions that are driving the adoption of analytics in India. Bhavish Sood, research director Gartner too chips in, "The three factors driving the analytics case are enterprise's focus on increasing profitability and revenue, enhanc­ing overall service and efficiency, and cost reduction too." Tradition­ally, Indians are known to concen­trate on performance management, he quips, however with the change in the business environment we need to be more competitive, the share of the domestic market versus exports' share is becoming more or less equal.

"With the changing trends in the current business scenario, BI platforms, including analytics, are increasingly getting more collabora­tive, mobile, and scalable. Analyt­ics tools are now making mark in the decision-making environments enabling visibility and providing insights across operational improve­ments, finance and cost manage­ment, and sales and marketing decisions," says Vineet Arora, MD, Aditi Technologies. However it's not all easy to lever­age analytics tools. Arora, cautions that most of the time companies fail to leverage simple tools and processes for analytics, and also fail to create closed loop intelligent workflow and consolidate data from disparate sources. Amarjeet Khanuja, delivery manager and competency leader, BI and data warehousing, Logica shares that with the current environ­ment and slowdown in the economy, investments in analytics are being viewed as an expense item. "Hence, it's a challenge for vendors to create a compelling business case for the company management and persuade companies about the power of ana­lytics and investment as part of the competitive strategy and to harness its strength for maximum advantage for businesses."

Vertical-view

No longer restricted to a particular segment, companies irrespective of the sector are increasingly feeling the need to have analytics based decision-making as a core to their company's strategy. For instance, Gautam Sinha, CTO and e-commerce head, Times Internet shares, "Analytics is being used in logistics, CRM, UI/UX, marketing, product, and sourcing at a strategic as well as at a tactical level. We have not moved to a cen­trally managed analytical structure relying on a particular BI/warehous­ing tool. Instead, analytics is woven into the fabric of each team with the tools and processes chosen by them as per their requirements. We use Google Analytics for clickstream and a combination of various open­source tools for big data." Globally, media and entertain­ment companies are looking at establishing direct contact with their customers and to achieve this successfully they feel that consumer information will be a key enabler and, in fact, help them in shaping a suitable business model for their company. As per Sood, analytics in the tel­ecom domain is increasingly finding acceptance, with the number port­ability coming in, telcos are looking forward to understand customer preferences.

"Customer analytics demand the deployment of analytic solutions for call detail records and network operation analytics in the telecom sector" adds Prashant Tewari, country manager, business analytics, IBM software group, IBM India. Most telcos are using analyt­ics for better churn management and customer retention. Regulatory requirements drive plenty of analytic requirements within the BFSI segment resulting in BI and integrated risk requirements. Panjwani of Accenture quotes an example of a leading Indian bank. The bank previously managed cus­tomer relations with static, manu­ally updated databases. As a result, tracking sales leads was challeng­ing, cross-selling opportunities were being overlooked, and turnaround time on customer complaints was sub-standard. "The bank then implemented a collaborative cus­tomer relationship management tool, which captures customer's queries and grievances, storing them in a centralized system. In order to generate an insight from this data, employees can now make a blog-like entries on customers-including ideas and suggestions for potential sales," he said.

The sales and product teams then analyze all information and propose new offerings, such as customizing existing products or offering entirely new ones. This bank reported sig­nificant benefits as a result. Turna­round time for processes is down by 70%, and the overall customer service experience-the processing of sales leads and service requests-has improved by 60%. Meanwhile, in other verticals like manufacturing, business insight re­lated analytics above the core ERP systems drive the need for analytics; the IT/ITES segment is driven by the need for superior performance management in the areas of human resource, customer; and financial analytics; while numerous public sector organizations such as regula­tors, ministries, and departments have their own unique analytic requirements.

Role of CIO in Analytics

India Inc has moved on from mak­ing decisions based on intuition and experience to modern deci­sion systems that take inputs from analytical insights. "With this, the need to automate the reporting and visualization of the insights over time is realized and thus the CIOs are required to implement solutions for the same," feels Rajaram. Since analytics is at a nascent stage, therefore, in India specifi­cally, it isn't easy to convince a CIO to deploy it. Very often, the CIOs find it tough to migrate from legacy systems working in silos to a modern system that integrates across units, connecting the same in agile fashion for churning out faster insights with greater accuracy and a future-proof approach. That said, organizations are warming up to investing in central BI organization to take care of ana­lytics. We are clearly now seeing the emergence of a CAO (chief analytics officer)/CDO (chief data officer) in the organization structure, along the same lines as the CIO.

Although most larger companies having already invested in key technology infrastructure like data warehousing and ERP, yet very often these can only process and store proprietary data. The next obvious step is to mash up this vital internal resource with targeted external data to deliver strategic insights in real­time. The objective for the CIOs is to ensure that key decision-makers, including the chief executive, are plugged into the targeted data and insights that will let them answer the question. For instance, the sales and opera­tions planning wherein decisions are still taken under the 'HIPPO approach' (the highest-paid per­son's opinion), this can be easily transformed, provided the CIOs can successfully embed predictive analytics capabilities into the fabric of decision-making processes. "All companies have 'got' report­ing. They routinely use descriptive, backward-looking analytics to handle that process Having already invested in the hardware, software, and talent, they need to manage that core function; the CIOs are now looking to connect these capabilities organization-wide, while exploiting developments in predictive analytics technologies to enable what is, literally, business thinking," says Panjwani of Accenture.

Market Evolving

Never before has there been a more important time for organizations to make better decisions based on fact based analytics. The financial crisis in the last 2-3 years has shown the price of unreasoned assumptions, and today the same urgency applies to organizations in every industry. Sharma raises his concerns that even though there is a high level of awareness, but deployment are low. But with the market growing and businesses eager to start and spread their operations, we can expect a significant increase of analytics deployment. Furthermore, Tewari feels that areas like mobile BI, predictive analytic models, and integrated risk management are the primary high growth areas for business analytics in the next 2-3 years. In the next few years, companies will thrive on analytics in a tough global economy that won't tolerate intuition and chance.

At a time when organizations are craving for security in very insecure times, data and analytics will provide them with the strong foundation and confi­dence that they need to excel with minimized risk. Ramchandran sums it up succinctly that there is tremendous po­tential in the Indian market, which­ever way we look at it-analytics or data mining. And the premise is one and the same. Today, there are numerous data sources for organizations to pick up data from, compared to a decade ago, eg, mobile data, internet, social networking, etc. Add to this an increasingly 'participative society' with regard to the consumption of information technologies and a demand for better and better services and products.