On contrary to common perception, Business Intelligence (BI) is not just performed by IT people sitting in huge enterprises, but also by common people in streets to compare prices while shopping. BI is inextricably intertwined with our lives today. We just don't realize it. When you relish a massive discount by booking a hotel room at the last minute after analysing the price, availability and other factors online, your decision is BI driven. Tools and technologies are only enablers.

Online decision support has been the long-standing trend for the past four years, as it has been endowing businesses with relevant information in real time. Be it buyer's position in negotiation, user's behaviour or competition analysis, BI gives the ability to collect data from both within (corporate data sitting in ERPs, financial systems and CRMs) and external to your system (social media) and presents its back. Not merely key words, but BI has developed the capacity to extract actual meaning from text, whether it is from thousands of contracts, emails or long chats.

“Not merely keywords, but BI has developed the capacity to extract actual meaning  from text, whether it is from thousands of contracts, emails or long chats.”

BI allows venture capitalists and angel investors to assess startups to understand their model and predict their reach & capability, as opposed to the older days when it was just a gamble. The extrapolation is same in large corporates with every new launch of product, service and geography. BI is allowing businesses to take far greater risk with the comfort of knowing that the risk is taken in corroboration with actual data. BI has dramatically reduced the amount of experiment done, the amount of pilot run and the amount of time that elapses while you test it out corporate wide.

Product Optimization

Predictive analytics helps you to connect the dots that you wouldn't normally connect without insight. If a certain strategy is not working, you can roll back to optimize the product by changing the product's parameters, PR, pricing or number of distributors before making any actual loss. Product optimization is emerging into a real-time demand. Data science is about understanding data usage and then might be using programming tools to address that. Since this is about programming, designing & system building, IT consulting firms play a very big role in the area of product optimization currently. However to perfect it, the IT industry has to relearn. Learning something new is easy. But dropping your learning and relearning is a daunting task for professionals. The answer is not hiring youngsters with zero industry knowledge, but motivating people with vast industry knowledge to learn new things in a very short period of time.

Ascending Demand

As the whole world is keen on replacing people from dumb jobs with machines, every system today has to be BI enabled to achieve analytical decision making. Replacing the Excels and Spreadsheets with smart tools has been made possible by cloud, which eliminates the need to investment in our own license, hardware and network. This reduction in cost will bring these tools to the hands of even the smallest companies.

MC3 - Accelerating Learning Curve

No individual can control the rate of change accepted by the industry. The drastic evolution of mobile phone from being a calling device with a small screen having fixed characteristics to a five inch screened device various characteristics fitting an entire laptop inside it - would be a fine example. As the time cycle to learn is shrinking and the challenges are mounting, the capacity to learn quickly has become the factor that differentiates successful companies from not so successful one.

From top management to downward, there has to be Motivation to master in that particular area. The Capability must be standardized across the organization. The level of Competency and capacity should be captured. Corporate performance must be calibrated in order to gauge the level of expertise people have attained, so you can accelerate the learning curve accordingly. We call it MC3 - Motivation, Capability, Competency and Calibration. The quicker you get the largest number of people to an expert level, the faster you can start earning. At Nihilent, we invest heavily in advance to accomplish the training in 90 days and create a viable tool in the next 90 days. This is a fantastic investment, because we produce a far better market returns within three more years.