Almost one and a half months ago, when we planned a special feature on Business Intelligence (BI), I guessed that a healthy percentage of India’s corporates must have already deployed BI tools to draw actionable insights from the data. My estimate was wrong. The CTO Forum BI Survey (nearly 100 respondents from across industry) suggests otherwise. Only 24 percent say they are using a proper BI solution. A majority (50 percent) still use spreadsheets, MIS, or other in-house tools to manage
their BI or reporting requirements. The good news is that it is not vastly different from the worldwide figures.

The technology is certainly in the hunt. A whopping 68 percent of the respondents to the survey agree that enterprise data, if channelized properly through a BI solution, can provide an extreme edge over competitors. Then what prevents organisations from adopting proper BI solutions? While discussing this with the CIOs and a few industry players, I found that the current cost of adoption of BI makes the technology prohibitive. The per-user or per-CPU license of using BI is still not very affordable for the midsize and even a lot of large enterprises. While only a few matured organisations have deployed the full-blown solution, a few others are at an initiation stage and the rest are ingenious - using home grown methods of reporting.

The reason: As with any other technology, CIOs are answerable to the investments in BI. The high cost of BI acquisition and the IT infrastructure upgrade makes it even more necessary for CIOs to calculate its ROI. A few CIOs say they are not compelled to calculate the ROI immediately but over a period of time, it is imperative for everyone to justify the investment made in BI.

What’s the solution? Will the situation change? Will CIOs get cheaper and more sustainable BI tools so that they are able to justify the ROI? What’s the answer to CIOs' woes?

This special issue of CTO Forum will answer some of these questions in greater depth. From a proper implementation methodology to exploiting your current BI tools to harnessing the power of Open Source BI to the actual usage of BI by your peers, there’s lot to learn.

I am sure you will find the information worth your time. As always, I will request your feedback to make it even more impactful the next time.

rahul.mani@9dot9.in