Enterprise apps that deliver customers and profitability are to be cherished but without buy-in from all concerned parties, deployment can be tricky
BI can be a source of profitability by enabling a company to weed out unprofitable areas and focus on those that deliver hefty margins after identifying them through analytics. It can also act as a source of strategic insight; letting you analyze who’s buying what, why and when and tailor promotions accordingly. The Indian BI market is growing at 20% and is expected to touch $285 million in the next 12 months driven largely by sectors such as BFSI, Telecom, Government and Retail.
Most mid- to large companies already have an ERP system in place and putting a BI/analytics system on top of that to glean insights from all that transactional data is simple common sense. One trend that’s emerging is that of the top brass using their iPads or smartphone to access dashboards and the like.
Even Cricket hasn’t been unaffected with the IPL seeing teams using BI to improve players’ performance.
Retaining customers, tapping into social media/crowd-sourcing, garnering customers abroad, mobile enabling customer-facing systems etc are all trends that are prompting organizations to go in for CRM. The downside, most deployments fail on account of an inability to get everybody on board. CRM isn’t just a technology, it has to be a part of business culture.
On the content-management front, ECM is quite popular, particularly in the IT/ITES space where gobs of unstructured data has to be classified, shuffled around and monitored. Cloud-based ECM is starting to catch on in the BPO sector for non-critical activities. Open source solutions are also proving popular in this area.
– Prashant L Rao
Editor, Express Computer