Interview with Amanjeet Saluja, Director, Analytics Services

1) What do you think are some of the most significant opportunities for companies in improving their business performance?

Organizations are not making adequate investments in building their analytics capabilities. The extent of a company's use of advanced data, technology and analytics in their customer related decisions is varying significantly across different organizations I have been talking to. This is one of the biggest opportunity areas for companies: taking inputs from all parts of business, processing them fully and making integrated action decisions.

2) What are some of the most common mistakes companies make regarding measuring or enhancing their business performance?

Organizations are making significant decisions on judgment basis which uses limited data or analysis to accurately evaluate and enhance performance. If you dig deeper, you will be surprised to see that they spend lots of energies generating a voluminous set of reports, which do not give them relevant insights of the business.

In my experience, MIS and so called “analytics” departments are churning out irrelevant heaps of “numbers” which do not enable them effectively answer “so what” questions for the business. I think they require the “right” kind of analysis built into the reports that they generate that serves the business problems they’re trying to solve.

3) What are a few of the most important new trends companies should pay attention to regarding the future of analytics?

The biggest trend to watch out for is how some organizations are moving up the analytics maturity and acquiring data driven decision making capabilities to not just become smarter about knowing their business but also to deliver customized products and services, thereby enhancing their business performance vis-à-vis competition.

The way some of these organizations are systematically managing their information, building in “right” level of reporting and analysis capabilities and operationalizing them for enhanced customer value addition is something to watch out for. Others will have to follow suit or soon will be out of business trying to compete with these so called “analytically mature” organizations!

Background of Amanjeet Saluja

Amanjeet is a Director of Analytics Services business of Inductis in India. He is responsible for building and running offshore Analytics services in Inductis. Amanjeet has worked significantly with Fortune 500 Financial Services clients improving their risk, marketing and operations strategies through deployment of efficient data management, behavioral segmentation and predictive analytics methodologies.