Announcing a Certificate Course on Business Analytics & Business Intelligence

For the second year students of BIMTECH

Date 27th September 2010; Trimester V

Why This Course?

Voluminous raw data lie around in most of the organizations that serve no useful purpose
unless organized into meaningful Information useable at various levels of Strategic and
Operational Management.

TV and radio have already contributed immensely in increasing the size and complexity of raw
data. With emergence and growing acceptance of digital electronic media such as Internet,
Social Media sites and Mobile telephony the volume of data generation has grown manifold
and the need to analyse data expeditiously has become order of the day.

Hence the need for Business Analytics is felt strongly. In order to win the battle, organisations
have to build competitive advantage based on how quickly they can identify patterns/trends
across apparently disparate information elements and exploit them in their favour. Business
Analytics and Business Intelligence can generate actionable information or ‘Wisdom’ by
sifting through raw data. It can also enable Managers to predict the future based on the
trends/patterns observed in the past.

The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the progress of Business Analytics &
Business Intelligence in industry, discuss the various tools and techniques in use and discuss
live case-studies on how Analytics & Intelligence has enabled businesses.

Many recruiters offer Management graduates an entry level designation of “Business

Analyst”. Couple of years back many leading recruiters in IT space had come to
BIMTECH and recruited in bulk offering ‘Business Analyst’ designation. Even
companies such as Deloitte, AC Nielsen and other consulting firms also like analytical
understanding and abilities. In short, appreciation of Business Analytics and Business
Intelligence will increase the employability of a student!

Background Information

Data Warehousing
Data warehousing is combining data from multiple and usually varied sources into one
comprehensive and easily manipulated database. Common accessing systems of data
warehousing include queries, analysis and reporting. Because data warehousing creates one
database in the end, the number of sources can be anything you want it to be, provided that the

1
system can handle the volume, of course. The final result, however, is homogeneous data,
which can be more easily manipulated.
Data warehousing is commonly used by companies to analyze trends over time. In other words,
companies may very well use data warehousing to view day-to-day operations, but its primary
function is facilitating strategic planning resulting from long-term data overviews. From such
overviews, business models, forecasts, and other reports and projections can be made.
Routinely, because the data stored in data warehouses is intended to provide more overview-
like reporting, the data is read-only.
This is not to say that data warehousing involves data that is never updated. On the contrary,
the data stored in data warehouses is updated all the time. It's the reporting and the analysis that
take more of a long-term view.
Data warehousing is used to house the necessary data for specific analysis. More
comprehensive data storage requires different capacities that are more static and less easily
manipulated than those used for data warehousing.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is a term commonly associated with data warehousing. In fact, many of
the tool vendors position their products as business intelligence software rather than data
warehousing software. There are other occasions where the two terms are used
interchangeably. So, exactly what is business intelligence?
Business intelligence usually refers to the information that is available for the enterprise to
make decisions on. A data warehousing (or data mart) system is the backend, or the
infrastructural, component for achieving business intelligence. Business intelligence also
includes the insight gained from doing data mining analysis, as well as unstructured data (thus
the need for content management systems).
No. Business Intelligence Tool Version Vendor
1. Oracle Enterprise BI Server 10g Oracle
2. SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI r2 SAP
3. SAP NetWeaver BI 7.0 SAP
4. SAS Enterprise BI Server 9.2 SAS Institute
5. Microsoft BI platform* 2008/2010 Microsoft
6. IBM Cognos Series 8 8.3 IBM
7. Board Management IntelligenceToolkit 7.1 Board International
8. BizzScore Suite 7.2 EFM Software
9. WebFocus 7 Information Builders
10. QlikView 9 QlikTech
11. Microstrategy 9 Microstrategy
12. Oracle Hyperion System 9 Oracle
13. Actuate 9.1 Actuate

* The following Microsoft BI Products are evaluated in the BI Tool Survey : SQL Server
Analysis Service (SSAS), SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) in combination with Excel and
Excel Services, where relevant accessed by SharePoint (MOSS 2010).

2
The most common tools used for business intelligence are as follows. They are listed in the
following order: Increasing cost, increasing functionality, increasing business intelligence
complexity, and decreasing number of total users.

Excel

Take a guess what's the most common business intelligence tool? You might be surprised to
find out it's Microsoft Excel. There are several reasons for this:

1. It is relatively cheap.
2. It is commonly used. You can easily send an Excel sheet to another person without
worrying whether the recipient knows how to read the numbers.
3. It has most of the functionalities users need to display data.

In fact, it is still so popular that all third-party reporting / OLAP tools have ‘export to Excel’
functionality. Even for home-built solutions, the ability to export numbers to Excel usually
needs to be built.

Excel is best used for business operations reporting and goals tracking.

Reporting tool

In this discussion, I am including both custom-built reporting tools and the commercial
reporting tools together. They provide some flexibility in terms of the ability for each user to
create, schedule, and run their own reports. The Reporting Tool Selection selection discusses
how one should select an OLAP tool.

Business operations reporting and dashboard are the most common applications for a reporting
tool.

Popular Tools

• Business Objects (Crystal Reports)

• Cognos
• Actuate

OLAP tool

OLAP tools are usually used by advanced users. They make it easy for users to look at the data
from multiple dimensions. The OLAP Tool Selection selection discusses how one should select
an OLAP tool.

OLAP tools are used for multidimensional analysis.

Popular Tools

• Business Objects

3
 • Cognos
• Jasper
• Hyperion
• Microsoft Analysis Services
• MicroStrategy
• Pentaho
• Palo OLAP Server

Data mining tool

Data mining tools are usually only by very specialized users, and in an organization, even large
ones, there are usually only a handful of users using data mining tools.

Data mining tools are used for finding correlation among different factors.

Business intelligence usage can be segmented into the following categories:

1. Business operations reporting

The most common form of business intelligence is business operations reporting. This includes
the actuals and how the actuals stack up against the goals. This type of business intelligence
often manifests itself in the standard weekly or monthly reports that need to be produced.

2. Forecasting

Many of you have no doubt run into the needs for forecasting, and all of you would agree that
forecasting is both a science and an art. It is an art because one can never be sure what the
future holds. What if competitors decide to spend a large amount of money in advertising?
What if the price of oil shoots up to $80 a barrel? At the same time, it is also a science because
one can extrapolate from historical data, so it's not a total guess.

3. Dashboard

The primary purpose of a dashboard is to convey the information at a glance. For this audience,
there is little, if any, need for drilling down on the data. At the same time, presentation and
ease of use are very important for a dashboard to be useful.

4. Multidimensional analysis

Multidimensional analysis is the "slicing and dicing" of the data. It offers good insight into the
numbers at a more granular level. This requires a solid data warehousing / data mart backend,
as well as business-savvy analysts to get to the necessary data.

5. Finding correlation among different factors

4
This is diving very deep into business intelligence. Questions asked are like, "How do different
factors correlate to one another?" and "Are there significant time trends that can be
leveraged/anticipated?"

Business Analytics

The field of business analytics has improved significantly over the last few years, providing
business users with better insights, particularly from operational data stored in transactional
systems. As an illustrative example, analysis of e-commerce data has recently come to be
considered a killer-app for data mining. The data sets created by integrating clickstream
records generated by web sites with demographic and other behavioral data dwarf, in size and
complexity, the largest data warehouses of a few years ago, creating massive databases that
require a mix of automated analysis techniques and human effort in order to provide business
users with critical insight about the activity on the site and the characteristics of the site’s
visitors and customers. With many millions of clickstream records being generated on a daily
basis and aggregated to records with hundreds of attributes, there is a clear need for automated
techniques to find patterns in the data. In this paper we discuss the technology and enterprise-
adoption trends in the area of business analytics.
The key consumer of these analytics is the business user, a person whose job is not directly
related to analytics per-se (e.g., a merchandiser, marketer, salesperson), but who typically must
use analytical tools to improve the results of a business process along one or more dimensions
(e.g., profit, time to market). Fortunately, data mining, analytic applications, and business
intelligence systems are now being better integrated with transactional systems creating a
closed loop between operations and analyses that allows data to be analyzed faster and the
analysis results to be quickly reflected in business actions. Mined information is being
deployed to a broader business audience, which is taking advantage of business analytics in
everyday activities.
Analytics are now regularly used in multiple areas, including sales, marketing, supply chain
optimization, and fraud detection.

The Business Users and their Challenges

Despite these advances in analytic systems, it continues to be the case that the business user,
while an expert in his area, is unlikely also to be an expert in data analysis and statistics. To
make decisions based on the data enterprises collect, the business user must either rely on a data
analyst to extract information from the data, or employ analytic applications that blend data
analysis technologies with task-specific knowledge. In the first case, the business user must
impart domain knowledge to the analyst, then wait while the analyst organizes the data, analyzes
it, and communicates back the results. These results typically raise further questions and hence
several iterations are necessary before the business user can start acting on the analysis. In the
second case, analytic applications must not only incorporate a variety of data mining techniques,
but also provide recommendations to the business user of how to best analyze data and present
the extracted information.
Business users are expected to better utilize the extracted information and improve performance
along multiple metrics. Unfortunately, the gap between the relevant analytics and the critical
needs of the intended business users still remains significant. The following challenges highlight
characteristics of this gap:
1. The time to perform the overall cycle of collecting, analyzing, and acting on enterprise
data must be reduced. While business constraints may impose limits on reducing the overall

5
cycle time, business users want to be empowered and rely less on other people to help with these
tasks.
2. Within this cycle, the time and analytic expertise necessary to analyze data must be
reduced.
3. Clear business goals and metrics must be defined. In the past, unrealistic expectations
about data mining “magic” led to misguided efforts without clear goals and metrics.
4. Data collection efforts must have clear goals. Once metrics are identified, organizations
must strive to collect the appropriate data and transform it. In many situations, data analysis is
often an afterthought, restricting the possible value of any analysis.
5. Analysis results must be distributed to a wide audience. Most analysis tools are designed
for quantitative analysts, not for the broader base of business users who need the output to be
translated into language and visualizations that are appropriate for the business needs.
6. Data must be integrated from multiple sources. The extract-transform-load (ETL) process
is typically complex and its cost and difficulty are usually underestimated.

In the end, to get an idea of the developments in Business Analytics/Business Intelligence

sector, following news item from Business Line dated Monday, September 27, 2010 is
reproduced verbatim:

Predicting and analysing is the new way to go

Swetha Kannan & Anjali Prayag

Bangalore, Sept. 26

What makes customers buy a bottle of beer or use their credit card in the middle of the
month? What makes a hotel room appealing to consumers — traditional features such
as tariff and breakfast menu or new-age preferences such as the ‘view' from the top? In
a recuperating economy where companies are looking at insights that help make
performance-altering business decisions, predicting and analysing is becoming big
business.

Numeracy experts

With large IT firms such as IBM, BPOs like 24/7 Customer, shared services firm Tesco
HSC, and even media conglomerates like Ogilvy looking at ‘analytics' as a serious
service offering to customers, and companies like HP beefing up internal analytics
practices, there has been a 15 per cent surge in demand for these ‘numeracy experts,'
“especially in the last two quarters,” says Mr E. Balaji, CEO, Ma Foi Consultants.

“While the last 15 years was all about ERP, the next 15 years are going to be about
business analytics,” says Mr Simon Thomas, Business Analytics Optimisation, IBM,
which has been beefing up its business intelligence and analytics assets with several
acquisitions.

Ms Nirupama V. G., Managing Director of recruitment firm Ad Astra Consultants, says

with the market on a rebound, companies want to field themselves in right positions
with the right strategies. “Therefore, there's a surge in requirements in both kinds of
companies — those that have not done well and those that did well and are looking for
new strategies.”

6
 Mr P. N. Sudarshan, senior director with consulting firm, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu,
which recently came out with its list of annual Fast 50 technology companies, said that
analytics firms too are gaining ground and feature among their list.

Huge demand seen

Sensing a huge demand in this segment, Bangalore-based Symphony Services has

developed a software platform that analytics companies can use. Ma Foi has a 15-
member dedicated team for hiring experts in the area.

Cities like Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad are fast becoming a breeding ground for
this specialised field which is embracing a new kind of workforce — not techies but
those with math aptitude and industry experience. IBM has set up a ‘centre of
competence' in Bangalore and has hired experienced professionals from various
industries such as retail and pharma, chartered accountants, PhDs, mathematicians and
even bankers. BPO 24/7 Customer has in fact hired the global head of analytics from
Ford to head its innovation lab, which is doing a lot of work in ‘predictive analytics.'

Genpact too has its analytics centre of excellence in Bangalore. Media group Ogilvy
recently set up its global analytics and CRM technology hub in the city.

Domestic market

Although much of the work done is for global clients, the domestic market is also
looking up, the BFSI segment in particular. For instance, in a turnkey project, IBM is
helping SBI set up an ‘information management' system.

While business analytics collates data from sources such as corporate sales figures,
market surveys and paid databases, another powerful data source is emerging in the
form of the Internet. Still in the nascent stage, ‘web analytics' involves scanning data on
the Internet, especially social networking sites, to listen to what consumers are saying.

“New-age media such as the Internet, social media and mobile phone will determine
business decisions in future as eyeballs are going towards online and digital media,”
says Mr Dimitri Maex, Global Head for Ogilvy Global Data and Analytics Practice.
Web analytics could well spur the next wave of hiring.

Faculty

Mr. Upal Chakarvorty, Chief Information Officer, DLF Limited.

Profile

After graduating from IIT(Kanpur) and IIM(Bangalore), spent almost 30 years as an IT

professional of which 21 years has been as a Head of IT/CIO in multi-location & multi
product environments at the Corporate level.

Worked as CIO of organizations in FMCG sector like Reckitt Benckiser and Pepsico,
BPO sector like Convergys, and Real Estate Sector like DLF. As Vice-President (IT services)
of ITC Infotech was responsible for formulation of IT strategies and plans and delivery of IT

7
 Services to businesses in sectors as varied as Hospitality (Hotels and Travel), FMCG
(Cigarettes and Food), Paper Manufacture and Printing, Retail and Commodity Trading..
Apart from responsibilities as a CIO, have been intimately involved for the last 10 years as part
of Senior Management in formulating business strategies and growth plans . Have been
members of Management Committees and reported to CEOs.

Besides, teaching on IT and Business-related topics ranging from Systems , Business

Intelligence, Analytics , Business Process Reengineering etc. in Institutions like IIT (Delhi) ,
IIPM, Institute of Chartered Accountants, IILM, MDI , etc. over the last few years during off-
hours has been a passion.

An active speaker in Professional Seminars related to IT and Business Management

Topics to be covered:

1. Introduction to Data Warehousing

2. Design
3. Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) Process
4. Dimensional Modelling
5. Project Management of BI Implementation
6. Data Quality
7. Data Warehousing, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
8. Data Mining
9. Multidimensional Analysis & Modelling
10. Dependency analysis
11. Mining Patterns
12. Clustering
13. Classification Trees
14. Hypothesis Testing
15. Correlation Testing
16. Data Preparation
17. Forecasting
18. Multidimensional Planning

Recommended book
“Multidimensional Data Analysis and Data Mining” – by Ajay Chaudhry and Dr. P.S.
Deshpande Published by Dreamtech Press.

Duration of the course

Thirty Hours; Classes will be held once a week on Sunday afternoons between 2:00 to 4:00
PM. Classes will start from 10th Oct 2010.

Charges

Participants have to pay Rs. 2000 (Rs Two thousand only) for the full course.

Certificate

8
After successful completion (With minimum 90% attendance) each participant will get a
certificate.

No. of Seats

Total 30 seats to be filled up on first-come-first-served basis.

Registration

Register your names with Ms. Meenakshi.

Contact

For any clarification please contact Dr. A. K. Dey (M) 9810387104