Business Excellence, Innovation is necessary and there is no Innovation without risk.

BI has been one of the most important business initiatives providing positive impact on the health of organizations. Usually, questions are raised on the maturity of the BI initiative and the technology backbone to yield business benefits. And after getting the desired benefits from the BI initiative, the obvious question has been “What next?”.

For more than two decades, organizations have been leveraging Business Intelligence (BI) platforms with the sole objective of ‘management by facts’ for business benefits. Traditionally, BI platforms have been spanning across Information Integration (e.g. ETL, EAI/ESB, CDC), Information Storage (e.g. Data Warehouse, Cubes, Metadata) and Information Analytics (e.g. Enterprise Reports, OLAP Reports, Dashboards and Data Mining) components. Over this period, the landscape of BI has changed with the touch of business integration and innovation. And this change is not just limited to the corporate world.

In the current dynamic market, the rate of change is faster than yesterday and what we do today may not be relevant tomorrow. E.g. change in the landline tariff didn’t happen for more than a decade, but mobile tariff and service plans are changing on an almost quarterly basis. To survive and grow in the vibrant market space, every organization is facing outrageous competition, business convergence, demand for profitable growth and intense pressure on cost. Organizations are becoming innovative in their approach to make business truly performance driven at Strategic, Tactical as well as Operational levels.

For business excellence, innovation is necessary and there is no innovation without risk. Hence for better performance, it is necessary to minimize the area outside the area under control i.e. the Risk Area. Precision in predicting risk (e.g. credit risk, market risk, operational risk) with BI provides the advantage of having more Capital available for operations as well as innovation e.g. Regulatory Authorities relax the Cash Reserve requirement, if predictions in Risk Management are consistently well under the threshold.

In spite of availability of advanced BI technologies in the market, most companies are still struggling to get the BI foundation right i.e. to set up an Enterprise Data Warehouse and governance and get reports and dashboards. Once the right foundation is set for BI, adoption of the new technologies and the path towards  institutionalization of innovation can be laid out. In the vibrant market space, the BI Program can provide a path to Certainty in Experience, while continuing the journey towards perfection. We always need to remember that it is a journey and not a destination!