Our effort at Yes Bank is to give our users meaningful information or insights based on the data that is generated. So we have divided our strategy into four phases.
Hindsight: The first phase is what we call Hindsight, to use Gartner terminology. It is more like operational reporting, wherein we have a lot of data, and basis regular dashboards that businesses require, we provide them the operating dashboards. Here we have moved away from our basic strategy of buy, as against build. We have built this software because we really didn't like anything we saw in the market.
We have conceptualized this Business Intelligence (BI) platform called Kaleidoscope as democratic BI application. Usually, not everyone gets to use the BI applications. While it might be data, they may not be delivered in the right shape, right form or at the right time. So, we laid out our vision which said that it is going to be democratic and action-oriented. I got to have some kind of a tracking mechanism to say: basis information, you were supposed to take action and you need to confirm whether the action has been taken or not.
We have conceptualized it as a role-based BI. This means that based on my role as the CIO or the branch head or the regional head, I will see different kinds of reports and dashboards and I can drill down further. This solution is live with around 450-500 odd reports running on it. If the user wants a new report, new dashboard, or a particular role require something, they come to technology, and we develop it for them.
Insight: The second is not meant for everyone. While Hindsight is meant for all knowledge workers, Insight is meant for analysts, who slice and dice data. This is at the central level. They juggle with data and look at various things and then they come out with insights. So there the guys don't have to come to us f0r new reports, they can do the reports themselves, slice, dice whichever they want. So this is something that we have already sort of started work on. Already implemented a couple of things but not really at the maturity level where Kaleidoscope is at. This is more in the early stages.
Line of Sight: Here is an easy example to understand the line of sight intelligence. When you go to Amazon.com, and choose a particular book, it does a market-basket analysis. It says: when a person buys this book, he usually buys these two books. It is like if you go to Big Bazaar, and if you buy bread, you also buy butter and you also buy eggs. Most of the people who bought bread, also bought eggs and butter together.
The same can be applied in banking too, where you can say if the guy buys a draft for a visa for US, then he can also buy foreign exchange. This is something we are currently working on.
Foresight: This phase is about predictive analysis, advanced analytics, data mining, and forecasting. That requires a lot of data because it extrapolates trends, and does a lot of interpolation and extrapolation. It is more accurate if you have more data. As Yes Bank is a relatively new bank, we don't have sufficient data to get accurate results from predictive analytics. So we have parked this phase for one year.
I like the terminology — Hindsight, Insight, LIne of Sight, Foresight.