Business

Monday November 24, 2008

How to make a BI-G difference in performance

By SURAJ RAJ


THE famous adage, “knowledge is power” still holds true, be it in good times or bad. Business leaders depend on information to make informed decisions, especially when faced with tough economic conditions such as the current financial crisis.

This is why business intelligence (BI) and analytics specialist SAS Institute Sdn Bhd (SAS Malaysia) reckons the need to improve organisational performance is more important now than ever before.

“Change is happening much faster because of globalisation and the fast availability of information. Business leaders need to act with a high level of accuracy and speed to cope with the changing economics and they need the tools to achieve this,” managing director Jimmy Cheah told StarBiz during SAS Malaysia’s Media Day 2008 in Cyberjaya recently.

Jimmy Cheah

He said enforced regulatory compliance, increased accountability and the intensifying economic landscape required people to make quick decisions that have a high degree of success. “All sectors need this. People need to drive business forward,” he said.

Cheah said SAS Malaysia wanted to increase awareness on BI as there was huge potential in the healthcare, retail and manufacturing sectors.“

There are thousands of manufacturers from the electronics to life sciences sectors that are now beginning to look beyond operational efficiency to embrace BI to create smarter processes,” he said. He added that the company has traditionally been strong in the banking and telecommunications sectors.

Cheah said the commercial sector had matured over the past decade, as organisations had been generally focused on enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

“ERP is the basis of data. We can’t act if there is no data to crunch. The commercial sector has now reached a level of maturity with ERP and this is where analytics comes in,” he said.

As part of the company’s aggressive push into the commercial sector, it will boost headcount by recruiting talent from specific industry verticals.

“We will probably add another 20 people by next year,” Cheah said.

IDC’s Asia Pacific Semi-annual Business Intelligence Tracker, 1H08, states that Malaysia’s BI user base was maturing, indicating that organisations were moving beyond ad hoc query reporting to more intelligent data mining.

The study revealed that the collective revenue of BI vendors in Malaysia grew 18.4% in the first six months of 2008 compared with 12.4% in 2007 and 11.8% the previous year.

The growth rate in the advanced analytics market outpaced the growth rate in end-user query reporting and analysis tools market during the period. IDC estimates Malaysia’s BI market to be worth about US$6.9mil for the first half of 2008.

IDC Malaysia market analyst Roger Ling said vendors were increasing efforts to educate the market by introducing more comprehensive solutions to enable organisations to draw more complex and predictive information from their data.

“Historically, BI growth in Malaysia has been spurred by the adoption of end-user query reporting and analysis tools. While this still holds true, the first half of the year saw advanced analytics gain traction with a growth rate of 22.8% from 12.2% in 2007,” he said.

The need for improved performance management and compliance coupled with the current volatile economic conditions would drive greater demand for the eventual adoption of business analytics solutions, Ling said.

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