It is hard to believe the staggering pace at which the dynamic wave-front of business intelligence (BI) continues to advance. Companies moving from BI standardization to experimentation with cloud-based, real-time and big-data platforms are on the rise. Stakeholders that adapt to this evolving environment faster have better chances of sustaining the competitive edge.

Rapid integration leveraging simple interfaces is going to become the standard in the future. According to a 2015 survey conducted by InformationWeek, 28% of respondent firms said that they are standardizing BI products. The past decade has seen a massive innovation across the BI space, which has resulted in a mixed and variable environments across the data value chain. More organizations are now adopting systems that render applications that are welterweight in operation. By deploying a leaner BI infrastructure that lends more homogeneity to the BI landscape, companies are now realizing the benefits of lowered costs, decreased time for information access and improved decision making ability.

We also see that companies are evolving from an organizational and cultural perspective with focused effort towards consolidating silos to a more integrated setup. The comprehensiveness and capability of BI platforms available now can traverse the length and breadth of core functions across the business domains of finance, marketing, human resources, etc. Thus, enterprises are moving in order to make sense of their multiple-tool infrastructure with an actionable strategy to determining the right tools that add significant business value.

The real value in movement to newer technology and advanced platforms can be derived only when organizations take stock of the applications that already exist and then rationalize to retire the redundancies. Frameworks that identify and then eliminate the duplicate reports and capabilities are increasingly taking center stage in the BI transformation journey. With the companies looking for newer avenues to spend lesser & lesser, enterprises can benefit reduced overheads and volume discounts which can be achieved by transformation to standardized platforms.

However, mere reduction of the number of BI applications is far from being a one-stop shop solution to the problem. Management of the multi-tool environment with a long term BI governance strategy that ensures a semantic approach for introduction of tools lays the premise for the alignment between BI and business initiatives. A holistic view of the strategy for BI transformation can be obtained by mapping the functional as well as technical value add to the business of each tool in the operating premise.

With a road map for transformation and rationalization that entails an unbiased understanding of the BI Inventory stack, enterprises can unlock the benefits of a cost-effective, agile and intelligent BI platform to stay ahead of the curve.

Vaibhav Suresh

Vaibhav Suresh is a senior executive in the Strategic Marketing team for Wipro Analytics. Vaibhav holds a Bachelors of Technology in Petroleum Engineering from University of Petroleum & Energy Studies, Dehradun and a post graduate diploma in management from K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research, Mumbai. In his current role, he is managing the marketing for Business Intelligence & CXO service lines at Wipro Analytics