Interview With Doculabs’ Gaurav Verma

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As a senior analyst and research specialist focused on the business intelligence (BI) market, Gaurav Verma is an expert on enterprise-scale data analysis, reporting, and information delivery technologies. Independent technology writer David Baum spoke with Verma to learn how market-leading companies are breaking new ground with their BI initiatives.

IB MAGAZINE: Tell us a little bit about Doculabs and your role within this organization.

VERMA: Doculabs is a technology-consulting firm that’s backed by research and extensive client experience. Our primary charter is to help Fortune 1000 companies who are strategically investing in technology and looking to maximize business value. We help these firms minimize the risk associated with technology investments. Most of my time is spent with commercial banking customers. Financial services companies constitute a large part of our client base.

IB MAGAZINE: In your experience, what drives these companies to adopt business intelligence solutions?

VERMA: Achieving operational efficiency is a recurring motivator. When properly deployed, business intelligence solutions can minimize costs associated with erroneous and delayed decision-making. Business intelligence enables users throughout the organization to analyze relationships and understand trends, including capabilities such as event tracking, decision support, and interactive and predictive analysis. Other companies turn to BI to improve their financial accountability through more accurate reporting, or to improve visibility into transactional and operational data.

IB MAGAZINE: How do today’s BI activities differ from those of a couple of years ago?

VERMA: Historically, the rules of the game haven’t really changed. BI is still predominantly concerned with how you get the right information to people who are making decisions. But today’s companies are refining the approach. It has to be relevant data. It should be presented in the correct business context. And nontechnical business users should be able to analyze it and use it readily.

We are also seeing a broadening of BI applications throughout the enterprise. In the past, BI was deployed as a departmental solution, and the promise of enterprise-scale BI applications was largely unfulfilled. But current economic conditions and regulatory compliance requirements are forcing corporations to create true enterprise-class performance-management solutions. In this era of post-accounting scandals, CEOs are responsible for the information they provide to the public. These executives, in turn, are demanding accountability from their subordinates, and it’s cascading all the way down, throughout all lines of business.

IB MAGAZINE: What other business trends are driving today’s BI deployments?

VERMA: Most Fortune 1000 companies have been through some type of merger or acquisition over the last few years. In the wake of these corporate upheavals, they want to consolidate their decision-support assets and construct a single, enterprise-wide business intelligence platform. It’s a tremendous challenge to combine diverse software resources into one platform, and then create an architecture that is consistent across the board. We are also witnessing the rise of business performance management (BPM) applications, as the traditional business intelligence dashboard is morphing into a scorecard with business content.

IB MAGAZINE: What tactics can customers use to ensure that their BI initiatives pay off?

VERMA: The corporate mantra right now is, “Do more with less and do it better than your competition.” One way to achieve this is to make sound, repeatable, fact-based decisions. This is precisely what BI delivers.

IB MAGAZINE: What are the milestones to achieving this objective?

VERMA: First and foremost is determining the strategic goals of the project. BI investments must be aligned with the organizational strategy, and there should be a way to measure the outcome. The second thing is to try and discover where BI has been successful at a departmental level so you can leverage existing BI components that you might already have in place within your organization. Once you perceive what is working within your environment, you can turn your attention to making it into an enterprise-wide platform. As I tell my clients, you should plan for an enterprise adoption but the implementation should be conducted in a phased approach to ensure success.

Third, it is imperative to take inventory of your existing tools. Most organizations already have multiple standalone analytic, reporting, and decision support tools in place. Start by learning how they are being used, then come up with a BI acquisition or consolidation strategy based on your needs and accomplishments. Many CIOs are making this a hard-and-fast decree: before you go out and make any new purchase decisions, you must take stock of what’s sitting on the shelf.

Finally, it’s important to perform a gap analysis to verify that your tactical directions are aligned with your overall corporate goals.

IB MAGAZINE: Where do companies go wrong with their BI initiatives?

VERMA: There is risk associated with providing old or infrequent information to decision makers. Having access to current information is absolutely critical, especially for businesses that are driven by transactions, like retail firms, financial services companies, and airlines – any company that has a very high turnover of products or deals in perishable commodities. These firms need zero-latency BI environments that support predictive analysis, forecasting, and business modeling capabilities.

IB MAGAZINE: As we drive closer and closer to obtaining a real-time view of production information, how does the underlying infrastructure have to change?

VERMA: The architecture has to accommodate real-time links to operational systems, and it has to be highly scalable. There are multiple people accessing information in real time. They want to be able to slice and dice it themselves, and do their own analytics. In some cases, rather than creating a data warehouse and periodically refreshing it, users need to access transactional databases directly.

The other big driver is the need to embed logic within your applications. Many companies have reduced their head count. They must be careful not to lose their intellectual property. Business intelligence applications can help preserve knowledge capital in perpetuity.

IB MAGAZINE: What are the primary ingredients of a complete BI solution?

VERMA: The first is comprehensive data management. Business intelligence solutions should include native ETL capabilities so they can utilize all types of data throughout the organization. Advanced tools like data modeling wizards are an added advantage. Next comes data mining and analytics. While these are standard offerings among business intelligence solution providers, enhanced architectures for mining and analyzing real-time information in zero-latency environments are becoming essential. The ability to use both historical and real-time information, and develop forecasting models and advanced business scenario models, fosters a natural progression towards predictive data mining and analytics, which we see as the next phase of business intelligence.

Third comes portals. While most BI vendors include a business intelligence portal, interoperability with third-party portal products is critical. Customers should also look for machine-to-machine workflow integration and closed-loop analysis made possible by software adapters and APIs, since these capabilities reduce the need for human supervision in the BI process.

IB MAGAZINE: What hurdles remain for today’s BI vendors?

VERMA: From a technology standpoint, the biggest hurdle is the need for predictive analysis. Vendors need to drive this capability into their products and educate the market on its intended uses.

IB MAGAZINE: What do you see as Information Builders’ strengths in this market?

VERMA: BI applications must be capable of extracting data from multiple source systems, organizing that data logically, manipulating the organization of data warehouses, building aggregations, running algorithms and analytical models, serving the data up to an interactive viewer, and distributing relevant information in consumable formats, all within a highly scalable framework. Information Builders does a good job of accommodating all of these capabilities within its WebFOCUS environment. It is Web-based, it is highly scalable, and it supports not just real-time access, but true analytics.

Information Builders has also made strides with its closed-loop business intelligence systems, which enable machine-to-machine integration. These applications don’t just deliver information, but include the logic necessary to perform prediction and forecasting activities. This empowers users to make actionable decisions, as opposed to simply saying, “Here is the data, now you figure out what you want to do with it.”

David Baum is a freelance business writer based in Santa Barbara, Calif.