Business Intelligence provides knowledge and and a 360 degrees understanding of an organisation from its data. This is according to Dennis Karanja , Head of the Business Analytics and Technology Division for SAP in East Africa. Karanja said this at CIO East Africa's quarterly CIO Executive Breakfast meeting held Friday morning at the Crowne Plaza hotel and was attended by more than 70 C-level executives drawn from various sectors.
SAP provides business intelligence and analytics solutions through its 2007 acquisition of French firm, Business Objects.
Karanja explained that intelligence deals with the need for real time information in addition to the ability to make predictions. A bank would like to know how a Central Bank decision to increase or lower base rates would impact it's performance. A telecommunication operator would like to know how a price war would predict its performance.

The business intelligence process starts from an organisation collecting data that it will use in the process. The data is then cleaned as unnecessary data will distort the information generated from it. The next step is generating of reports from the data which is then followed by generation of the predictive analytics . The analytics process is not a one off process as the analytics need to be optimised and fine tuned to achieve higher accuracy.

Karanja said benefits derived from analytics include the ability to stay ahead of your competitors. An airline is able to predict and model how different decisions like purchase of new planes and new routes would impact its profitability.

He gave a case study of a manufacturer who was in the process of implementing a business intelligence solution and discovered that one of his product lines had never made any profit while generating expenses. A decision was reached to discontinue the product immediately.

Modern analytic solutions provide more of value compared to past solutions which dwell in cost optimisation techniques.

An intelligence tool helps an organisation looking to execute a strategy to have a clear understanding of the corresponding opportunities and risks.

"However, while many firms are anxious to deploy BI and analytics tools, few of them are ready to collect and organise the data needed for it," said Karanja.

SAP predicts future trends in analytics will include more reliance on RAM as more data will need to be loaded onto memory for analytic processing. Disks provide slower data access in comparison to memory.

Mobile devices will also play a greater role in the analytics process. Karanja says this is especially true for Kenya where he estimates that there are 4 million PCs against more than 21 million mobile devices. This will evolve further to augmented reality whose impact will be felt even by customers. Shoppers will be in a position to use their phones to shop for stuff such as clothes, navigate in a shop setting and even virtually try clothes on.

Collaborative decision making will also be an emerging trend. This will include information generated from the analysis of the individual buyer tastes and preferences and decisions drawn from the analysis of social media.