Business Intelligence (BI) - is an applied IT direction, which is of constant interest. Constant attention to it from the market participants is explained by the fact that there is a shift in emphasis from the standard tasks of operations automation of the bank to the direction of thorough processing of the collected information for the successful planning of the organization. However, despite the growing popularity of BI solutions, there is a large unrealized potential of BI tools.

According to a recent study by Gartner BI platform market will remain one of the fastest growing segments of the software market. Analysts are predicting an annual growth rate of 7% for the period till 2016. At the same time, Gartner noted that BI direction, in spite of being a very mature market and standing in the priority list for IT Directors for many years, lacks customer's demand. This trend is typical for the world and for the Russian market, as mentioned at the recent conference Modern business analytics is the real way to improve competitiveness Dwhich took place in Moscow.

In particular, Boris Evelson, vice-president and principal analyst of the Forrester Research Inc. consulting agency, noted in his speech that nowadays companies use only 12.5% of their data dealing with systems of business analytics. According to Boris Evelson, the main difficulties that limit the ubiquity of BI today, including predictive analytics in the business environment, are related to the problems of integration, complexity of its application and the gap between the tools and models used. The unification of terminology and metadata in the BI products, flexibility and friendliness of the application interface, and integration of models of corresponding complexity into advanced BI tools can become the solution to the abovementioned problems.

According to the Forrester's expert, there are several key success factors for BI projects implementation. First of all, the stringent requirement of management to implement and use BI. Second, there should be a strict regulation of areas of competence between business and IT. Third, the detailed study of the management processes and constant monitoring adjustment and improvement of BI applications are required.

EFFECTIVE TOOL

One of the main benefits the organization gets from BI implementation is the ordering of data from various sources, transformation of "raw" data, which are collected in the course of daily activities, into useful information. BI tools include ways enabling to easily access this information and to manipulate the data, aggregate them, process, and present them as the information for decision making.

Another benefit provided by BI, is the ability to turn raw data into information which gives a deeper understanding of the business. For example, in addition to data on the number of products sold one can receive the useful information on how and what actions and campaigns affect the sales trend, which products are best sold in each customer segment, depending on the time of year, the region of sales and other key characteristics of clients. Changing the parameters of products sold, one can detect the impact of these changes on the sale. Providing access to such "intelligent" information, BI enables organizations to conduct business more efficiently. Therefore BI can be regarded as an instrument for growth of client's business profitability.

One of the key objectives of BI is the customer analytics, crosssell and analytical campaign management. When the bank understands the needs and behaviour of customers, it can offer them a better deal, develop the best product and, therefore, improve the client base and increase profits.

There is a situation where, on the one hand, the BI introduction gives the bank better and faster understanding of its customers, but on the other hand, the more complex and deeper customer analytics is, the more data need to be provided to the system. Additional information can be collected from customer's applications, questionnaires, by analyzing customer behaviour on websites and data from social networks. Even binding customer segments of analytical CRM to groups of various social surveys and statistics can be a great help in the problems of the formation of targeted offers to customers.

In experts' opinion all these actions allow achieve significant results. First of all, to improve customers' loyalty and reduce their churn. Second - to extend the terms of product usage by the customers and average number of products per customer. Finally - to cover new customer segments and sell new products.

EXPERT OPINION
Julia SKIRSKAYA, director of analytical systems department in R-Style Softlab

First of all, the bank needs to formulate expectations of the system implementation and to identify customers' it is designed for. The most effective are the projects initiated by the business units, because in this case the user knows for sure for what purpose the solution is being implemented and can clearly list the requirements for it and tell what kind of results he hopes to achieve. Also, the credit institution must consider and assess the extent of implementation: it can happen that the system that was originally designed for dozens of work places shall interest hundreds of banking specialists with its abilities. An important role in the project is played by the correctly prepared and detailed documentation. Applicable technology of data acquisition, including sources, algorithms and processing techniques, and the principles of generation of enduser forms must be specified in it.

BI solutions must dynamically grow along with the bank's needs. For business, it means constant expand of analytical views, forms of analysis, visualization and reporting. It is therefore necessary to choose a tool that will allow you to customize the analytical layer of the system without involvement of outside experts (e.g. from banking IT service).

The main advantage of BI solutions is a radical reduction in the time required for preparation of analytical reports, as the BI architecture is focused on work with large volumes of data and allows you to build reports "on the fly", without going through lengthy preliminary calculations. Thus, the speed of the user operations increases, thereby increasing the amount of information arrays they process. Embedding of such solution provides flexible access to the data and allows skipping the fulfilment of a specific functional task.

R-Style Softlab believe that all the above BI benefits appear in full only if the solution is correctly implemented by properly qualified personnel. Then the users will almost immediately feel the difference after the completion of the project and the start of the new system usage, such as after using the RS-DataHouse for solving analytical problems instead of previous large XLS-tables.