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How to make BI pervasive: It's the culture, stupid
Corporate climates can get in the way of widespread use of business intelligence software
By Eric Lai | Computerworld US | Published 09:00, 19 September 09
Business intelligence software may have been around for several decades, but it remains an esoteric niche in most companies, according to an analyst.
Unfriendly corporate cultures, not the BI tools or apps themselves, are preventing BI from becoming pervasive.
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"The technology has been around for a long time. It's the people that often get in the way," said Dan Vessett, an analyst with IDC.
IDC recently conducted a study of 1,100 organisations in 11 countries measuring how pervasive BI is in companies, what factors helped make it more pervasive, and what "triggers" data warehousing architects and IT managers can use to the further the spread of BI in their companies.
In a speech Tuesday at Computerworld's Business Intelligence Perspectives conference in Chicago, Vessett said IDC measured BI's pervasiveness via these six factors:
- Degree of internal use. According to IDC, that was between 48 to 50 percent.
- Degree of external use, or how much it shared data with vendors or customers. Sharing BI data keeps customers loyal, Vesset said. And canny BI users in industries such as retail can sell that data to generate non-trivial revenue, he said.
- Percentage of power users in a company. The mean was 20 percent in surveyed companies.
- Number of domains, or subject areas, inside the data warehouse. Over five years, the average at surveyed companies grew to 28 from 11.
- Data update frequency. While real-time updates can be indicative of heavy dependence upon BI, "right-time data updates" is more important. "Daily, weekly or monthly could be sufficient," he said.
- Analytical orientation, or how much the BI crunching helped large groups or the entire organization make decisions, rather than isolated individuals. "The fact is that most individuals and companies are not data driven. They still rely more on experience rather than analytics," Vesset said.
