INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Four Ways to Boost Business Intelligence Adoption

August 30, 2006

It's no longer a question of whether everyday business intelligence (BI) will happen, but when. More industry surveys point to the growing importance of BI and the drive to expand beyond small-scale deployments.

CIO Insight says 92 percent of companies that use BI plan to use more.¹ And The Data Warehousing Institute predicts that the number of everyday BI users will double from 18 percent to 39 percent over the next three years.²

Now, AMR Research has completed a survey on BI adoption, and its findings suggest similar trends: BI prominence, spending, and users are on the rise.

Increasing BI investment

John Hagerty, Vice President and Research Fellow at AMR Research, says businesses are spending more on busines intelligence to leverage their data. The AMR survey bears this out. "Better utilization and analysis of data" was ranked as the first or second priority across all industry sectors, including high tech, automotive, pharma, and consumer products. And this is influencing IT investments.

Performance management spending is expected to reach $23 billion in 2006, up 3.2 percent. Within this total, business intelligence and dashboards/scorecards are garnering the most attention – BI investment will rise 10 percent to $6.3B, and dashboards/scorecards will increase a whopping 26 percent to $5.2B, Mr. Hagerty writes.³

Why now?

Mr. Hagerty says companies want to improve business performance – whether it's doing more with less, streamlining processes, increasing alignment, or achieving greater transparency. And BI can help them do it.

The growing interest in BI mirrors a shift in thinking too, as organizations come to rely less on gut feel or instinct and more on analysis and fact-based decision-making. This requires a reliable and consistent information environment.

And many companies want to put this decision-making capability into more hands. As The Data Warehousing Institute suggests, broad BI usage is "the key to unlocking the full potential of information to enhance worker productivity, optimize processes, and achieve strategic objectives and goals."⁴

Four ways to increase BI adoption

As companies shift from localized, departmental BI to broader collaboration, they will need a system that everyone can use. In the AMR survey, respondents identified four approaches to fostering broader adoption:

Information for the masses: Features like self-service reporting and simple report viewing allow a range of workers to use information the way they want, whether they're analysts, business managers, or casual users. Email and portal delivery provide familiar distribution channels that everyone can access.
Information in context: Mr. Hagerty places high value on pre-delivered analytics that capture key business functions. Packaged content provides a business view of corporate data, so users can more intuitively analyze processes and performance indicators across key functions.
Information in "sound bites": Dashboards and scorecards communicate complex data quickly, using visually rich presentations such as maps and charts. People gain an at-a-glance understanding of performance metrics and business issues without having to wade through pages of data.
Search-enabled reporting: A good BI search engine lets users quickly find information presented in all BI sources: analytics, reports, and metrics. It should also enable broader participation by allowing non-BI users to access reports and other BI content in addition to their enterprise content.

Barriers and how to overcome them

Software vendors like Cognos can deliver enterprise-level systems that support everyday BI. So IT has few technology issues to contend with.

But organizations are seeing some business barriers to BI expansion. According to Mr. Hagerty, the biggest roadblocks are lack of resources and training. Other barriers come from lack of ownership and cultural resistance.⁵ Luckily, there are steps that IT can follow both to address the issues and present a convincing case for broader BI:

Create a BI Competency Center (BICC). A BICC can provide the centralized knowledge, skills, and best practices to help make a broader BI initiative possible. Those that take such a measured, well-managed approach will gain wider support and are more likely to succeed.
Build training plans. Research shows that a user who receives a one-day training course would likely be four times more productive with the software. They would also need much less ongoing support from the help desk, managers, or coworkers.
Build a business case. Provide a road map or blueprint for BI development. A business case can articulate long-term requirements and strategies as well as risks and costs, so there are fewer surprises down the road for IT and other stakeholders.

The greater reward

Mr. Hagerty suggests that while challenges abound, the rewards make it worth the effort. IT will need to overcome the barriers simply because business intelligence is a business priority in a growing number of organizations. "Spending is increasing, and deployments are expanding. BI is 'front and center' in companies' minds, not just in terms of monitoring the business, but improving it," he writes.⁶

For IT, it's a matter of understanding the needs and managing the process to ensure that when BI is deployed on a broad scale, everyone will want to use it.

Find Out More

Sources

¹ Allan E. Alter, Business Intelligence is Valuable, But Falls Short of its Potential, CIO Insight, Oct. 5, 2005.

² Wayne W. Eckerson with Cindi Howson. Enterprise Business Intelligence: Strategies and Technologies for Deploying BI on an Enterprise Scale. TDWI Report Series, August 2005.

³ John Hagerty, Expanding BI Beyond the Power User, AMR Research Alert, July 20, 2006.

⁴ Eckerson and Howson. Enterprise Business Intelligence: Strategies and Technologies for Deploying BI on an Enterprise Scale. TDWI Report Series, August 2005.

⁵ John Hagerty, Expanding BI Beyond the Power User, AMR Research Alert, July 20, 2006.

⁶ ibid.