What now for Business Intelligence?
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
User demands for BI are changing – people are looking for clear answers, not reams of reports.
The face of business intelligence is changing. Companies have experienced the frustrations of flashy reports and complicated graphs, which while impressive at first, often confuse the decision making process more than they help. Instead, trends are showing people are looking for something more from their BI solutions – in particular they’re looking for solutions that tell them concisely what they need to know, and most importantly when they need to know it.
Of course, there will always be a place for sales reporting and other types of retrospective statistics, but we are now entering the era of ‘actionable intelligence’. That is intelligent monitoring systems and analytics that spot business issues and risks that need a person to get involved and address issues before they escalate. For example, the difference between knowing how many of your deliveries were late last month, compared to knowing how many of your upcoming deliveries are about to be late can be vital to your supply chain and to your customer’s experience.
Gartner’s user surveys show that “improved decision making” is the top driver of BI purchases. Capabilities that will evolve BI from an information delivery system to a decision platform will increase the value of BI and drive its growth. According to Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner “With ‘ease of use’ now surpassing ‘functionality’ for the first time as the dominant BI platform buying criterion, vocal, demanding and influential business users are increasingly driving BI purchasing decisions, most often choosing easier to use data discovery tools over traditional BI platforms — with or without IT’s consent.”*
Companies such as the Hauste Group are seeing opportunities to provide cloud based reporting to these business users – remving the need for a BI implementation to be an ‘IT project’, and keep the focus on quickly delivering the information the business needs.
“We’re finding more and more, customers are by-passing their IT department – who are often short on resource – in favour of cloud based BI. They send in the data, and we send them the analysis. That’s as simply as we like to keep it.” commented Chris Varga, Lead Solution Developer at Hauste Group.
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*source: Gartner Forecasts Global Business Intelligence Market to Grow 9.7 Percent in 2011, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1553215
