Business Intelligence - Empower Business Decisions

One of AnalyticsWorks‘ clients in the Mobile VAS (Value Added Services) domain generates over 16 million data transactions per day. At an average record size of about 1KB per transaction, this translates to a database of roughly 480GB per month. In terms of storage this is not an expensive affair at today’s storage costs. However, it translates to a nightmare for decision makers looking for high level business and revenue trends in an ocean of transactional details.

To keep the information retrieval scalable, the need for a good warehouse design cannot be overstated. With high growth in Mobile, Media and Advertising companies, their information systems are growing at an equally furious pace.

Early adopters for Business Analytics in Mobile and Media companies have a distinct advantage of developing and sharing a Business Intelligence discipline within the organization to gain a bigger piece of the market pie. It allows decision makers to focus on modifying and creating strategies by having a robust automated solution for fact-finding. The short learning curve and the initial investment in an Analytics solution is easily offset by the improved Business Performance resulting from speed of Analysis and the value of insights which are currently unavailable.

AnalyticsWorks has always followed the philosophy of listening to clients and partners to alleviate their pain points and providing refined solutions which suit their operational and strategic needs. In this vein, the Analyticsworks team is currently working on an exciting feature that can fundamentally change the way business users view and harness Business Analytics.

The latest addition to the strong feature list is bringing Business Intelligence to your mobile phone. This feature is under final testing stages. This has the potential to radically change how business users access the analytic information for their organization. With the increasing pace of information churn and the need to have data ready “here and now”, the need for Mobile Business Intelligence is a necessity.

To enable this, the new mobile version of AnalyticsStudio will allow Business users away from a PC to view Reports and Charts of interest on their mobile phones. Watch this space for more news!

A recent IDC survey (source: Intelligent Enterprise) indicated a third straight year of 12% growth in Business Intelligence software sales globally. This has put the global sales of BI applications in 2007 to $7.05 billion. Also, packaged software sales to SMBs (< 999 employees) in India are expected to reach US$770M in 2008 (source)

The relevance and benefits of Business Intelligence and Analytics to medium-large enterprises cannot be overstated. It becomes very interesting when you take the two facts above and apply them to the Indian enterprise applications domain.

With the slight latency in adoption of Enterprise level applications between India and the developed world, the expected growth and adoption of BI should logically be higher in coming quarters. By making Analytics and BI accessible to increasingly smaller businesses a tremendous potential is being created for innovative BI solutions providers like yours truly to cater to this growing market. When this results in better business performance at a reasonable cost of ownership for small businesses, it will be a win-win situation for providers like AnalyticsWorks and the businesses that benefit from BI.

A recurring issue with information systems at our Mobile VAS client is the existence of disparate and disconnected databases as a result of multiple applications and systems. In fact, in most medium to large businesses, information is stored in places ranging from manually maintained spreadsheets to very well designed and tuned databases, without any centralization for information retrieval.

There is a wealth of Business Information and bottom-line influencing trends sitting in these multi-platform systems waiting to be leveraged for Business improvement. It becomes necessary for a truly valuable Business Intelligence solution to meaningfully aggregate this data from different sources and provide Business-relevant insights. Our experience with creating sound Datawarehouses and Datamarts at AnalyticsWorks has been useful in bringing together a single consistent view of the Business Performance to our clients.

With businesses increasing their IT spends, information platforms are going to be increasingly dissimilar and the corresponding need for good Data Aggregation practices will be critical for an Automated Centralized View to improve Business Performance.

Adding another feather to its cap, Analyticsworks, an innovative Business Intelligence Solution provider based out of Mumbai, India announces launch of the enterprise edition of its business intelligence product Analytics Studio. The new version the product has capability to provide

• Enhanced user experience with enterprise level security
• Personalization at individual user level
• Desktop Ticker with password based security
• Advanced Report Scheduling
• Web service based information retrieval
• Optimized connection pooling

Analytics Studio has been designed keeping the most frequent needs of the decision makers. It is a fully featured business intelligence product suite covering all from basic reporting to trends visualization to advance analysis capability with OLAP reports. Analytics Studio is a web based application, compatible with all standard browsers like IE / Firefox, which enable to host it on intranet or www. It comes with a unique Desktop Ticker which allows the decision makers to track the business critical numbers directly from their desktops in real time.

Analytics Studio has been positioned as an affordable option for BI implementation for any industry or domain. Its flexible architecture allows it to integrate it with any database which can be accessed by JDBC or ODBC. E.g. Oracle, MS-SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, MS Access, etc. It can work with multiple data sources simultaneously giving a seamless experience to the end user.

A flash based demo is available at http://analyticsworks.com/demo.html

About Analyticsworks:

Analyticsworks is a professional services firm that helps medium and large companies leverage the information age to make better decisions by extracting intelligence from the data. People behind Analyticsworks have a strong track record of helping leading companies strengthen their business with their unique mix of the understanding of business as well as technological expertise. With Retail and Mobile VAS as major focus areas, Analyticsworks consulting practice conceptualizes, develops and implements high-value business intelligence solutions to provide a 360˚ view of the business and its customers.

Analyticsworks’ methodology helps it’s customers to obtain relevance out of their data. This structured, logical approach has potential to improve profitability significantly for our clients. The BI practice at Analyticsworks helps clients achieve better results through scalable and cost-effective solutions. Analyticsworks’ cross-functional teams provide clients a range of services including implementation of data warehouse, OLAP based reporting solution, advance analytics using Statistics, data management and maintenance, ongoing support for periodic analytic tasks (e.g., marketing campaigns).

Analyticsworks specialize in identifying high-impact problems and opportunities where we can generate results quickly, creating immediate and lasting value

For more information please contact business@analyticsworks.com

According to a recent survey, the mobile users are thrice as affluent as non-owners in India. Experts believe the people who are using mobile phones are more shopping freak, open for new offers, ready to take up various kinds of financial products and latest consumer items.

Consider these facts from IIMS Dataworks’ Invest India Incomes and Savings Survey 2007:

• Over 46 per cent of earners from the country’s 73 million households with mobile phones could be in the market for life insurance in the next 12 months (27 per cent will definitely buy life insurance, the rest are considering it);

• Over 10 million earners from these households will be in the market for mutual funds and another 7 million will be looking to buy equity, in either the primary or the secondary markets.

Read Full Report at AgencyFAQs

Mobile based marketing can be one of the effective mediums to target this segment. This gold mine needs to be tapped carefully with non intrusive manner or gratification based consent.
Organizations doing mobile based interactions with their subscriber base should start investing in performing user profiling / segmentation and start monetizing their traffic using mobile advertisement. Analyticsworks has a great solution to address this need.

mKhoj has already started getting the benefiting from our efforts. Take a look at the attached case study.

mKhoj Case Study

India-based mobile advertising company mKhoj made its first public appearance in the media today. It has announced an interesting and novel way of advertising, that’s not only innovative but affordable to the pockets too. Now Mumbai residents can access deals from thousands of brands, retailers and merchants across the city.

All you need to do is type in key search words like the ‘product’ and the ‘location’ and SMS it to mKhoj (at 6767777). And voila get ready to see a collection of the best deals for that product in and around the locality, on your screens.

The key to success of the platform is its ability to track return on investment by individual advertisers on the money they spend on running their deals at mKhoj. Analyticsworks has helped mKhoj in achieving this by providing state of art business intelligence solution using its product Analytics Studio. Advertisers can also know the views they are getting on its active deals, what kind of searches users are making who are getting their offers, what is the overall traffic at their categories and location.

The above list is just a sample, the actual implementation has covered the entire business of mKhoj, enabling them to effectively manage Sales, Usage, User Behavior, Operations, Promotion Inventory and Content Quality.

We wish mKhoj a great success in providing mobile advertising for the India market.

The lastest version of Analytics Studio is ready.

Take a look at
http://analyticsworks.com/demo.html

In Part 1 I talked about the areas where Analytics can impact in HR functions like recruitment & training. In this part we will extend its scope.

Performance Management
This is one of the most challenging functions within HR. They need to ensure the fairness and transparency in the entire process. HR managers across the world try very hard to make it as objective as possible, however the subjectivity factor can’t be sidelined. An incorrect (negative) performance appraisal can lead to employee’s exit. Head of the business units also need to track if individual employees are not getting victimized of their immediate supervisor whims. With the help of analytics the decision makers can track of abnormalities in the appraisal process. They can also identify the employee with very fast or very slow career growth, verify it and take corrective action if needed.

Compensation
Knowing the variation of the salary of an employee with his peers, market average. This will prevent dissatisfaction and once again prevent unwanted employee churns. Using data driven analysis approach one can compare the salary growth vis-a-vis the performance to ensure one is getting compensated well according to his capability and the contribution to the organization.