Scope and Future Trends of Business Analytics in India

Business Analytics have become vital for the growth and development of the companies of today. Large investments are being made in big data analytics to make better business decisions from past data. This past data is being generated by different sources such as business people, marketing, education, engineering, medicine, social media, on-line transactions, call centers, sensors, web logs and telecommunications.

Need for the right analysis

In this day and age, when the economy is challenging and the business landscapes are changing faster than ever, it is critical for organizations to focus on their critical business issues. It is also useful to understand the nature of these challenges. With increasing competition and plenty of options, consumers are always on the look-out for the next-best-thing. Business Analytics plays a very important role here as it uses statistics and tools to decode consumer insights. This is done based on accrued data, and Business Intelligence that garners key insights that can help predict future behavior, in effect, helping businesses run better. The latest developments in Business Analytics’ technology are playing a crucial role in automating the analysis process. It is also enabling both data analysis experts and business users to interpret data more easily and quickly. Business analytics are key differentiators, which provide a competitive edge to companies across industries.

The Indian talent pool

Experts believe that India is amongst the leaders in the talent markets. Its success with the IT sector for the last two decades, strong entrepreneurship culture and English language skills have helped India to stay ahead of China and Eastern Europe in the domain of Analytics. The scope is huge in India as many more companies from abroad are outsourcing their analytical requirements to India.

Scope of Business Analytics in India

The scope in the field of business analytics is ever expanding and is helping it become mainstream as companies of all sizes and analytics skill levels get into the big data game.Exploring business analytics needs the right focus, right technology, right people, right culture and top management commitment. Companies like IBM, Accenture, and Deloitte are using business analytics tools and coming up with decisions that are useful and profitable. One needs to acquire a particular skill-set to succeed in a business analytics career. Inquisitiveness, interpretation skills, thorough understanding of tools and methods, ability to do in-depth research and quantitative skills are vital to excel in the subject. Sensing the need to create a workforce that understands the field and is trained to tackle the complex issues related to business analytics; Indian institutes, in association with several premiere colleges, are offering regular as well as executive business analytics courses. Apart from the regular colleges, there are several analytics training institutes that are offering their own business analytics courses or are in collaboration with renowned institutes. In April this year, BML Munjal University inaugurated their Business Analytics Lab, in partnership with IBM. In this Lab, under the Career Education program, IBM is providing relevant software and training using various industry cases to the faculty members of BMU. Faculty will use this knowledge to teach MBA students specializing in Business Analytics. The objective is to enable future business managers with the requisite skill-sets to succeed in any business, industry or function they choose to be in.

Promising future trends

Experts believe that the following trends will dominate the world of analytics in 2015.

1. Analytics will play an important role in data security. Analytics are already transforming intrusion detection, differential privacy, digital watermarking and malware countermeasures.
2. The Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to grow rapidly in 2015. Analytics tools and techniques for dealing with the massive amounts of structured and unstructured data generated by IoT will continue to gain importance.
3. Companies will voice their need of routinely monetizing their own data for financial gain.
4. Growth of Cognitive Analytics.
5. Relevance of ‘Open Source Solutions’ will regain momentum.
6. Focus on Tax Analytics- This will simplify the process of recovering overpaid transaction taxes and helping to prevent future overpayments.
7. Boost in demand for Data Scientists- a hunt for people who can balance quantitative analysis skills with an ability to tell the story of their data in compelling, visual ways.
8. Companies would become over-critical and cautious about Data Accuracy.

Basis the aforementioned elements and points, it would not be wrong to say that the demand in the Business Analytics market would grow at an impressive pace in the upcoming years.

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Author: Professor Ashok Kapoor, Dean-Corporate Engagement, BML Munjal University.