India need not panic due to the reduction in the number of H-1B visas, as this will result in more American companies coming to India to invest, thereby benefiting the Indian industry, according to Jairam Ramesh, secretary, economic affairs department, All India Congress Committee.

Delivering the inaugural address at The Business Intelligence Conference 2003, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry, in New Delhi on Wednesday.

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Ramesh said that Indian industry needed to look inwards and within the next five years, the services industry -- like banking, insurance and other related sectors -- would lead the IT revolution in India and eventually force other sectors to become IT compliant.

The railway reservation system is a great example of Indian IT competence, he said, and felt that Indian industry needed to exemplify more such competencies in order to become more self-reliant.

Ramesh said that the full value of Business Intelligence was yet to be realised in India and there is a need to redesign the entire information flow.

Along with the redesigning of information flow, there was also a need for decentralisation of hierarchy, he said.

Empowerment of managers at all levels was absolutely mandatory, he said. Otherwise, it will be used to reinforce the existing patterns of power flow, he added.

Ramesh lamented the fact that the IT sector in India was still being looked as a separate business entity and there was a need to integrate normal corporate business activity as also to incorporate IT with the mainstream business activity.

Ramesh called for widespread IT literacy in India and urged the industry not to consider IT as a niche segment. He said that the domestic IT user interface was negligible and backward linkages with the Indian industry were absent.

However, with increased competition, Indian companies should brace up to face the challenges and there was a need for external benchmarking, he said.

Earlier, Sanjiv Mathur, head (marketing), Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd, in his introductory remarks, said that business intelligence helps serve two main purposes -- it monitors the financial and operational health of an organization and regulates the operation of an organisation.

Mathur said that the information feedback enables business intelligence across the enterprise.

Aditya Sapru, director (South Asia), Frost & Sullivan, said that the use of business intelligence helps the organisation to identify their top selling products, their most loyal customers, businesses that are performing the best and which need improvement, the efficacy of promotional campaigns and how exactly it is reflected in sales.

Sapru, however, said that there are multiple challenges which are low IT maturity, lack of product understanding, lack of historical customer track records, integration bottlenecks and ambiguity related to return on investments.

He said that the business intelligence market in India is still at a nascent stage. But he felt that the market is likely to grow during the next couple of years.