Data at centre of corporate competition: report

Corporates in India are competing based on insights from integrating institutional data, social media data, and machine data.

Analytics solutions have matured from business intelligence and reporting to predictive and prescriptive tools for effective forecasting, scenario planning, simulation, optimisation, complex risk modelling, and NLP.

This is the finding of a Nasscom-Hansa Cequity report on Analytics Maturity in India. It also showcased how the country has been gearing up to make a vital difference in the way global companies make decisions.

The report, ‘Application, Innovation and Maturity of Indian Analytics’, was released as part of the Big Data & Analytics Summit organised by Nasscom in Hyderabad in late June. However, while opportunity looms in India, some challenges persist.

Mohana Krishnan, Director, Nasscom, said, “Disruptive technologies, informed customers, rapidly changing business models are presenting challenges as well as opportunities for enterprises to explore innovative solutions available in the ecosystem. The need for drawing better insights from huge volumes of data has fuelled the need for innovative analytic solutions.”

Ajay Kelkar, Co-founder and COO, Hansa Cequity, said: “Data scientists were ranked by HBR ( Harvard Business Review ) as the sexiest job of the 21st century. In partnership with Nasscom, we used our own consulting framework – Smart Analytics Impact™ framework – to assess the work of participating data science teams and review some of the more innovative case studies.”

The report showcased how industries such as banking, retail, mining, aviation, agriculture, government, transportation, hospitality, and energy and utilities are adopting analytics solutions to gain competitive advantage.

But, as Hansa Cequity’s Kelkar underlines, talent supply chains across companies in India don’t yet possess all the right skillsets.

“By itself, analytics isn’t everything. The tech side of it is important, and analytics is much more about change management that is required to bring about impact. More fact-based decisions have to be made with analytics in the picture. Industry tends to look for understanding of specific technology, but successful analytics teams look for a combination of technical, business and data skills,” he explains.

The report on Analytics Maturity in India was developed with the participation of a range of organisations, including global in-house centres, analytics providers, and Indian buyer enterprises across different industry sectors.

The innovation and business impact created by these companies by leveraging analytics was showcased through submissions in the areas of Customer Experience & Lifecycle Management, Revenue Maximisation, Operational Efficiency, and Compliance & Risk Management.

The study also threw up trends to watch for in India. For one, besides the opportunity to develop and hire talent with intersecting skill sets, the work of analytics teams in the next few years will evolve to centre on unstructured data along with structured data.

“There seems to be more understanding now that the C-suite, the senior management, needs to get involved in adopting and understanding analytics for better decision-making.

“We’re also seeing users beginning to ask for analytics as a SaaS product,” shares Kelkar.

While Hansa Cequity’s research efforts have unveiled the richer ecosystem for analytics that has developed in India, data-driven decision-making and data-driven marketing are likely to mutually fuel each other in the coming years, creating a new normal across sectors.

Already, according to the report, even many local government agencies have been early adopters of analytical solutions to provide better citizen centric services.