Yesterday, Capgemini announced that it is to make a "major investment" in its Business Information Management (BIM) service line, including the hiring of an additional 3,000 consultants and the creation of a Centre of Excellence in India, staffed with 1,000 specialists.

I was interested to find out more and was able to track down Paul Nannetti, the newly announced general manager of Capgemini's global BIM service line, just as he was about to board a plane.

I started out by asking him a little bit about the BIM service line and his new role. He explained that this is the area of Capgemini that assists clients in managing their information lifecycle - the capture, cleansing, analysis and presentation of data, both structured and unstructured, so that business can measure their performance against internal goals and to decide on new strategies. In other words, it's a set of services that tend to fall under the umbrella term 'Business Intelligence'.

While this is a new role for Nannetti, he's been at Capgemini for 15 years. Most recently, he has spent two years working at group level on the company's industrialisation strategy - the way it turns experiences from individual projects into a recognisable 'product' that can be offered to other clients - and on introducing remote offshore delivery centres in India. Prior to that, he was head of consulting in continental Europe for two years. He's also ran the company's Nordic business, its global life sciences practice and its European CRM practice.

So why has Capgemini decided to increase its focus on and investment in BIM right now? "This is a very hot area right now," he told me. "Our technology partners are investing heavily to develop new solutions in this area. Our clients have many challenges in this space, but see many opportunities in conquering them, too."

Nannetti gave me four reasons why companies might hand their BIM processes to Capgemini:

1. They want to tap into the expertise of consultants who have delivered BI in a range of different companies and industries. "These consultants know what works and what doesn't," he said.

2. They require help in navigating the complex and crowded market for BI tools. "We have strong relationships with all the major suppliers in this areas and many of the less major ones - but we bring an objective, technology-agnostic perspective to the decision.

3. They need someone to help with the "translation work" between business people and IT people - so that the information requirements of the business are fully met by the systems and technologies at its disposal.

4. They want to take advantage of the cost efficiencies available by offshoring some of the work involved in BIM.

But is business intelligence work a suitable candidate for outsourcing, I asked. After all, most companies still prefer to outsource tasks that they believe are not core differentiators for them - what could be more core than managing performance and identifying new opportunities?

Nannetti explained that, in many cases, companies will look to Capgemini to take over a significant portion of the IT work; the development, implementation and running of systems; and the production of reports. "But the design of reports and the interpretation of the information they contain certainly needs to be in the hands of business analysis specialists and these will often be in-house personnel," he said.

The India-based Centre of Excellence won't be a single location. It will primarily be based in Mumbai, but work for financial services companies will be carried out in Pune. Staff in these locations will also be supported by staff in Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore.