ROLE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND CLOUD COMPUTING IN ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing can provide immense value to the business and can reduce the expenses incurred with respect to capital investment activities. Business Intelligence environments require huge capital investment in order to implement and support the data volumes which will be huge, so as to analyse and identify trends and forecast. Also, enormous processing power is required for the same, which puts the business under extreme pressure. BI if offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to the business will allow them to reduce huge cost of having a BI solution of their own.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

The key for keeping the business profitable and competitive in today's business environment is having a thorough knowledge of the environment and the various processes in it. Having a right insight into this aspect will allow the business to take necessary actions in order to identify opportunities quickly and get the most of it as well as to address the trends in the market. It is important to apply data analysis techniques on their information to drive decisions and actions for businesses to have better insight into their day to day activities. This gives them an edge over its competitors to set the right strategy to achieve targets, identify opportunities and weaknesses and to become a dynamic business. Hence, making use of Business Intelligence (BI) to produce and process information about the environment for strategic purposes is always an advantage for the business. This is very important for making well informed business decisions.

Enormous processing power and space is required for processing large amounts of data in the data warehouse. These resources are crucial for businesses to run its daily operations and there is a limit to the support that Information and Technology (IT) departments can provide. It is under this scenario that the importance of cloud computing comes into picture and if used with proper planning, it can be highly successful to provide scalability for peak periods. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the business can use when it is in need and pay only for what is used.

Business intelligence is often referred to as the process of making better decisions through the use of people, processes, data methodologies and related tools. Business intelligence is mainly rooted in relational databases, warehouses and marts that help organize historical information available to business analysts to generate reports that inform executives and senior departmental managers of strategic and tactical trends and opportunities. Instead of implementing and using complex and expensive software on-site, the BI software enables a firm to run on the Cloud. It avails accessibility through any web browser and this forms the so-called software-as-a-service model.

The need for installing software or buying any hardware never arises. When the amount of computing needs to grow, the system will automatically assign resources accordingly to meet the needs. This elastic scale makes Cloud BI so powerful. The users now pay only for what they use as against the traditional way of paying to provision for peak load. With business intelligence software running on the cloud, it still provides the possibility of making comprehensive integration with back-end systems – both in the cloud and within User Company.

Companies face the following hurdles when making use of Business Intelligence:

1. High capital expenditure and operational cost.2. Skill shortage to effectively use BI to create and maintain a value adding business

analytics solution.3. Large volume of data generated from CRM, ERP, GPS and historical financial

statements.4. On the go demand solution within a short timeframe, for various business

activities.5. Data is generated at a brisk pace and hence powerful processors are inevitable.

Functions of BI technologies:

1. online analytical processing,2. analytics and data mining,3. complex event processing,4. business performance management,5. benchmarking,

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent technology trends, by relying on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.”

Characteristics:

1. Pay per use and on demand2. Ubiquitous network access3. Resource pooling4. Rapid elasticity5. Measured service6. Service models7. Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a

service (IaaS)

The deployment models can be – private, public or hybrid clouds.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND CLOUD COMPUTING

Business Intelligence – “It is a set of theories, methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information”. BI can handle large amounts of information to help identify and develop new opportunities and to implement an effective strategy to provide a competitive advantage and long-term stability.

Data Warehousing in the Cloud

Customers have a variety of cloud-based data warehouse options. Using SaaS or DaaS providers offer data analysis services, you can employ powerful, full-stack data warehousing technologies with little effort and pay just for what you have used. These solutions require no large outlay to start off. The user can sign in just by using a Web browser, sometimes, with a free trial, and then start uploading data on the go. These solutions include tools such as ETL for migrating data and automatically building out visualizations to slice and dice your data. PaaS providers, like Google Apps, are still not ready and may take time to support large data sets and can lead to a complex analysis. Storage and query model of Google supports basic data management and retrieval but can’t handle the complex analysis available in modern database management systems.

Cloud infrastructure offers you an opportunity to craft a best-of solution for your data warehouse at literally a fraction of the cost of doing it in house, along with availability, scalability and pricing at levels which can be only achieved by the largest data centers of the world.

Advantages of BI on the cloud:

1. Demand: Massive computing capability on demand is available instantaneously.2. Unlimited elasticity: Hugely scalable on demand, the resources can be released

when not required.3. Low cost of ownership: Pay as you use for minutes, hours or days based on the

capacity usage, affordable.4. Flexibility: Can scale computing resources with few barriers.5. Ability to reduce the BI implementation windows.6. Reduced cost for BI programs.7. Ability to add environments for proof-of-concepts testing and upgrading.8. Geographic scalability

Cloud BI Platforms:

1. Informatica Cloud2. Microsoft3. SAP4. SAP Business Objects On Demand5. IBM

6. Cognos Business Intelligence 10.1 7. Blue Insight, IBM’s own business intelligence (BI) and analytics private cloud

deployment8. Oracle9. Cloud ready Business Intelligence with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

CIO SURVEY

"CIO Tech Priorities research shows that top IT decision-makers plan to increase spending over the next 12 months. A major share is expected to go to cloud computing services, mobile technology, business intelligence and analytics. CIOs offer their insight into the findings."

Growth by Technology across different sectors

Why CIOs are moving towards Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence?

With rapid change in Customer base for a product and better decision making process of a customer drastically reduce the Product Life Cycle time period. Demand forecasting and trend analysis is always an important aspect for any company to reduce inventory cost, carrying cost and reduce reserve stock and reasonably predict the sales to plan for future capital expenditure. Analytics is an important area in stock market analysis where they predict the stock market to reduce their risk in portfolio management.

In all the above situations, time required to understand and make decision is very less and hence within short period of time you could be out of the competition if you are not updated with the latest information and inference of it. So it is largely the fear of elimination from the industry that the competitor might benefit from the technology is forcing people to invest in IT.As long as all of us go in a particular there is no reason to be worried as the damage caused would be to all the players in the industry

The Cloud Impact on IT Organizations:

1. We shall see a transformation in the organizations from programming to service integration and customization.

2. With the cloud and SaaS pricing based on usage, IT budgets will open the door for immediate IT investments.

Impact on Cloud Computing Vendors:

1. Cloud infrastructure utilization and its boasting efficiency will contribute critically to success.

2. Cloud infrastructure and SaaS vendors (any BI that are provided as services across wire) will emerge as the new giants of the industry where the IT operations shop for infrastructure and SaaS applications.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN CORPORATE WORLD

To overcome these roadblocks many of these firms are adopting cloud computing to provide for the business as needed. Cloud computing enable these firms to use IT as a utility. This shift would provide the following benefits:

1. Simplified delivery of IT: enables use of services ‘on demand’ as per the need of the business

2. Enriched user experience: provides an integrated user experience to connect and communicate anywhere by any means

3. Efficiency: through optimal use of time, people, processes and technologies4. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): reduction in TCO through the minimization of

capital investments

Few of the solutions provided by cloud computing:

Resources Cloud solutionsRetail branch workstation Unified delivery platform which would

enable efficient delivery of servicesNetwork Priority is assigned to information

based on message type business rules to control traffic

Personnel Unified delivery platform can combine many of the process which would reduce the resources required

Storage Infrastructure architecture which provides secure encrypted transmission inside or outside the firewall

CLOUD - BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE'S FUTURE

The low cost and easier deployment advantages related to the use of Cloud BI enables it to be a way for reporting and analysis solutions to be developed installed and consumed more easily. Typically, a cloud-based BI platform is employed to solve one of the three primary customer needs listed below:

1. It can act as a reporting and analysis application—by using traditional relational database.

2. It can act as a reusable component platform where an application can be used across all domains.

3. It can act as an analytic application that solves a customer problem.

THE BENEFITS OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

1. SaaS solutions effectively reduce the costs and maximize performance.2. The industry is moving towards a pure variable cost structure.3. It helps to be more flexible and easily adaptable to any change in the industry.4. Big Data can help businesses identify unnecessary costs.5. Multi-tenancy - used by more than one client thus reducing the total cost.6. Flexible - altered quickly to give access to new analysis and reporting features

CHALLENGES OF BI IN THE CLOUD

1. Ability to scale-up is Limited.2. Cost-reduction strategy may face diminishing returns.3. Performance of physical data access.4. Reliability of service concerns.5. Pricing is variable and complex.6. Shared development can be a challenge.7. Dynamic provisioning of servers requires configuration scripts during start-up.8. Keep an eye to the ground as technology and landscape changes rapidly.

CONCLUSION

1. The business should rightly find the balance between the risks and rewards of computing in the cloud.

2. Deploying BI in the Cloud ensure programs become more agile, flexible and scalable and agile.

3. Cloud service architectures and vendors are still immature and it is best suited for development and test environments, in sandboxes.

4. It is a challenge to configure databases and BI tools to run on the Cloud.5. The Cloud has a great potential to change the way that we deliver BI to the

masses

REFERENCES

1. Big Data: The Management Revolution, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Harvard Business Review Article, October 2012

2. What the Companies winning at Big Data do differently, Satya Ramswamy - Harvard Business Review Article, June 2013

3. The Value of Big Data Isn't the Data, Kristian J Hammond - Harvard Business Review Article, May 2013

4. IT in the Cloud Era, Aaron Levie - Harvard Business Review, June, 20135. Mobile, BI and Cloud Drive Increased IT Spending, Lynn Haber, November 20126. http://sortbenchmark.org/ 7. http://www.cio.com/article/721380/

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