The rise of BI in education sector in India

In a country like India, where there is a very high demand for quality education, there is a new trend in education sector being witnessed, where lots of universities are adopting newer technologies. To meet this demand in order to deliver quality education in this sector, Business Intelligence finds its applications in many areas like Measurements in performance metrics, Analytics, reporting, collaboration, knowledge management.

Prof. S. Krishna from IIMB believes that India has still not evolved to adopt Business Intelligence as educational institutions are very slow to the change & they are very slow to respond to student needs in our country. He also stresses that the need to implement BI must come from faculties & students & be aware of how it can ease their process in better decision making.

Mr. Rajesh Ramaswamy from Marlabs Software shares with us about how BI can significantly impact education sector in India.

How BI is used in education sector in India?

In University space, their aim is to improve their quality, recruit the right kind of faculty, admit the right students & if they can identify students who are lagging in some areas based on their history & they can be better at something else, so they can correct them with electives, guide them during placements. That’s their primary objectives.What are the challenges to implement BI in universities in India?

Lack of centrally available data. For eg. In US, we know the entire demographics of a student, like where he’s from, what background, school studied, scores for every subject through out the life cycle. Using that, we can form the profile of the student & match every new student to that profile. And based on how students have performed in the past, we are able to predict how these students will perform in the future. But if we have to do that in India, we have to do it in buckets, for eg, if IIT’s might have data of students who have applied for IIT or graduated from there. But it gives them very limited profile. Secondly, even if they have all these data & demographics, its very difficult to match profiles exactly as some students might have done schooling from interior parts of Karnataka etc.,.

What is the size of BI & analytic in Indian education sector?

The market for BI in education sector in Indian market is predicted to be around $140 million. This is only for software licenses alone. The overall BI market would be around $7 billion.

What are the competitive advantages for startups in this space?

The biggest advantage for startups is that this area has been neglected by big players in the market, primarily because the margins are low. The schools & universities have not been able to afford the cost. They can start on a level footing in education sector with software solutions. Otherwise, there are standard advantages for startup is that they are flexible, agile, they can cater to specific needs, but primarily from an education perspective, the competition is low, compared to retail or other sectors for startups.

How do you see the growth of BI & analytics in next five years?

It’s very difficult to predict, but they say we are at a cusp. The Gartner & others are predicting exponential growth, but we are on the knee of that exponential growth, not seeing the real growth. The key thing is the way organizations are collecting data & they realize the value of moving up on the pyramid from data to knowledge to insight to wisdom is probably the key which determines growth in India. And in India, we keep predicting but it never seems to grow every year, but one year suddenly out of the blue it explodes. That’s the trend we are seeing in other industries. Probably that’s the growth we will witness in education sector as well.

You can reach out to Rajesh Ramaswamy on mail.