'Cos That Take Analytics Seriously Perform Better'

Enterprises risk being thrown back in the rat race if they miss out on any critical data-driven decisions empowered through analytics. In conversation with Biztech2.com, Scott Tunbridge, APAC Product Director EPM, BI & Exalytics, Oracle explains the relevance of Business Intelligence in today’s context.

What is the relevance of Business Intelligence (BI) tools in today’s unstable global economic condition?

We are at a stage when time-sensitive requirements within ever tightening budgets are the biggest concerns for enterprises. It has been proven that companies which took analytics seriously have performed better than those who didn’t. Take for instance, the unprecedented growth of data that the smartphones are producing. Now, every company in the telecom space wants to understand this massive amount of data being produced for running their business machinery and maximising profitability. The way the entire data and information cluster is stacking up is in itself the biggest reason BI is absolutely relevant today.

To make things more clear in terms of BI’s relevance today, I can say that the fall of the American property market or the current Eurozone crisis can be majorly attributed to the kind of decisions companies made, without proper analysis of the information that was available.

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What major challenges do CIOs face managing the huge influx of data coming and piling up everyday?

When the data volume is so huge, the first challenge is how to store all this data knowing that most of it might not be used. Secondly, the kind of end-user experience which you now see with Google - for instance, where you type and suggestions start coming up - the same is expected from enterprises as well to deliver information within sub-seconds. Also, the current tools available are not capable enough to understand the whole lot of unstructured data, right from Twitter feeds to YouTube videos. Another challenge which can’t be ruled out is cost effectiveness. Even if CIOs decide to go for a high-end analytics tool, they need to first establish what value it will bring along for their organisation.

How should CIOs go about addressing these challenges?

To start with, the IT team should do a basic internal survey in which they it figures out what the end-user requirements are from an analytics perspective. For example, users may need the information out of their data within seconds but the current tools available might not be capable of delivering that. CIOs need to look for solutions that can deliver the sub-second response power to the end users, that are scalable up to any number of users at any point, and can understand all types of data whether it’s structured or unstructured.