Like never before, CIOs want to get more for less from their IT investments. Latest trends like big data, BYOD and cloud have opened up new channels to deliver affordable IT in enterprises. Infosys BPO, a leading business outsourcing provider in the world, has made significant strides in its journey empowering clients with actionable business insights by leveraging big data and other IT initiatives.
Anantha Radhakrishnan, SVP and global head Enterprise services, Business transformation and Technology services, Infosys BPO, recently had an interaction with Infotech Lead to discuss the latest trends prevailing the big data and mobility arena in enterprises.
According to Radhakrishnan, clients are increasingly leveraging BD-BI wrapper to gain simple business insights from the complex information deluge created by different types of devices and network components.
“They want actionable insights, modelling of the future, predictive analytics to give them certainty in an uncertain world by leveraging BD-BI wrapper, enable simple business insights as they have an information deluge (complex) but no easy way to decipher, they want a paradigm shift from technology in terms of move from capex to opex while leveraging the BD-BI wrapper put together for the enterprise and pay for business outcomes achieved,” Radhakrishnan said.
The strategy at Infosys BPO is to deliver business insights, real time reports at points of relevance, what if models and scenario analysis, quantitative data brought together with contextual qualitative data to enable better business outcomes and business performance. All of this is done by bringing industry knowledge, functional domain and technology together. The way this is delivered is on tap /on demand leveraging the cloud and mobility investments as well -hence unleashing the power of sunk invests in some of these areas, he added.
According to Radhakrishnan, the big data – business insights (BD-BI) wrapper is only an incremental investment over the existing data storage and infrastructure enterprise sunk invests. That is how the incremental investment and ROI needs to be projected including the enhanced and unrealized benefits of past sunk investment returns in the numerator and incremental invest in the denominator.
However, an IDC study of 2012 shows only an abysmal 0.5 percent of the data stored in the world is been leveraged today for business insights. To improve RoI from big data deployments, Infosys advises CIOs to:
- Co-draft a strong business Champion who benefits from the BD-BI wrapper
- Showcase this is not old wine in new bottle as the depth and impact of the business insight can enable a paradigm business shift (bring qualitative context relevant unstructured data with quantitative existing data)
- This incremental investment is the tipping point for your enterprise information elephant to dance -the proverbial last spade to dig and realize or hit water.
Infosys’ Big Data Edge platform, for example, helps both technology and business rapidly develop and deliver industry-specific insights. It helps generate insights eight times faster, 40 percent quicker data extraction and real time action on decision, Radhakrishnan said.
Some of the big trends that open new possibilities in the big data market include predictive analytics, real time reporting, reports at points of relevance through leveraging mobility, unstructured and context relevant qualitative data combined with quantitative structured data to get informed business insight to improve business outcomes and industry insights.
Infosys also focuses on mobility initiatives in enterprises. Initiatives like BYOD have brought new set of challenges to CIOs in IT enabled services and IT services sector. With the average employee age been 25/26 years and the proliferation of new devices and associated operating systems and social media (Facebook, Twitter, what’s app), there is pressure in this sector to allow employees to bring their own preferred device to work and use that to log on within the enterprise networks and access enterprise and client applications on the go or move while not compromising on data security and data privacy.
The Business Process Management (BPM) and IT services sector in India has been fast in embracing BYOD, Radhakrishan said. Infosys BPO has embraced select smart devices as part of the enterprise ecosystem for a part of the employee population. This employee pool of BYODer’s will gradually get expanded based on business need, he added.
Some of the latest trends in BYOD as noticed by Infosys include increase in usage of Device to Device swap, ability to access across multiple smart devices, staying ON and connected across soft and hard devices and on the Go, the ability to retrieve and swap info across multiple channels (within and outside enterprise), thinning and blurring of lines between personal and corporate ecosystem in terms of information boundaries and need to enhance availability, security and privacy (ASP) while delivering to the new needs.
“Most of our technology value accelerator solutions are now getting multi device and operating system compatible and help clients and the folks in their ecosystem including our employees who work for them access required data on the go. As we expand it further we will ensure this is done within the gold standards on data security/privacy and robustness of availability,” Radhakrishnan said.
Infosys’ strategy is to continue to lay focus on the business value delivered bringing to bear a holistic combination of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Analytics technology along with Industry and function domain and capable people in a sustainable way, he concluded.
Rajani Baburajan
