The dot com burst in India is right here. All financial numbers of the so called B2C funded e-tailers show heavy bleeding. With all the MBAs and financial analysts and accomplished executors in place, still we see press releases, stating that they are looking for the right metrics! When the valuation was going up, they were all hyping about GMV (gross merchandise value) and now they say we have lost 1000s of crores. Bad for the investors and founders.

This poses an important question. What tool we must use to monitor the business performance? P&L tools? Transaction tracking tools? Cash flow trace tools? Imagine if one of these heavily loss making companies had gone public last year. The losses would have been taken care by the public money! Some 10 lakh poor retail investors would have bought 20 shares each @ Rs. 1000 (just an example), thus 10,00,000 * 20 * 1000 = 20,00,00,00,000! In a week 2000 crore rupees of loss would have been wiped off by the hard earned money of the retail investors! Does this reflect the real business performance?

Business performance measurement needs multiple inputs from sales/revenue side, accounting side, supplier side and customer side. All these will be tracked using software applications. We need to get the critical data from these applications in a data warehouse and from that we must do analytics.

Whether it is technical or business performance, finally it boils down to a lot of data and analytics on top of that. The more analytics we are able to provide, quickly and simply, that too in real time, it will help both the CIO and the CEO.

Perform Better. Perform Faster.