Business Intelligence and Analytics
Improving Organizational Decision-Making Through Pervasive Business Intelligence:
The Five Key Factors That Lead to Business Intelligence Diffusion
Evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence and analytics solutions is growing. Business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytic application, collectively business analytics, technology and processes are being deployed to support decision-making. An increasing number of organizations are making BI functionality more pervasively available to all decision makers, be they executives or staff employees, managers or suppliers. But having BI be pervasively available in an organization means much more than distributing reports to all stakeholders.
In some cases BI solutions are deployed to automate an existing way of making decisions. In other cases, BI solutions are deployed to change the way decision are made. The change involves moving from decision-making in which the variables that go into the decision are unarticulated and estimated to one in which the variables are articulated and supported by historical values. This point highlights the importance of defining pervasive BI as more than dissemination of information to all. It is quite possible that BI with incorrectly specified models or misunderstood data is worse than not using BI in the first place. In this study, IDC set out to:
- Define pervasive business intelligence and its key indicators
- Identify the key influencers of pervasive business intelligence
- Highlight best practices for moving along the path to pervasive business intelligence
Methodology
Findings of the study, were based on a year-long research project that included in-depth interview with 22 leading organizations and a survey of more than 1100 additional organizations in 11 countries. The research methodology was developed by IDC and contributors from Boston University School of Management Information Systems department
Key Findings
IDC research resulted in the following definition of pervasive business intelligence:
Pervasive business intelligence results when organizational culture, business processes and technologies are designed and implemented with the goal of improving the strategic and operational decision-making capabilities of a wide range of internal and external stakeholders.
IDC identified six key indicators of pervasive business intelligence:
- Degree of internal
- Degree of external
- Percentage of power users
- Number of domains
- Data update frequency
- Analytical orientation
"In addition to defining a set of six specific indicators of pervasive BI, IDC identifies five key factors as having the strongest influence on BI pervasiveness," said Dan Vesset, research vice president, Business Analytics at IDC. "For the first time, organizations embarking on or continuing on their path toward pervasive BI, are provided with guidance about allocating scarce human, capital, and IT resources to tasks and projects that have the biggest impact on increasing the dispersion of BI throughout their organizations and to their external stakeholders."
These five factors with greatest influence on BI pervasiveness include:
- Degree of training
- Design quality
- Prominence of governance
- Non-executive involvement
- Prominence of performance management methodology
Sponsors
Research results from this IDC study are available from IDC and the study sponsors. They are:
- Actuate Corporation
- Business Objects, an SAP company
- Cognos an IBM company
- GoldenGate Software
- Information Builders
- Jaspersoft
- Microsoft
- Progress Software
- Spotfire, a division of Tibco
- Tableau Software
- Tata Consultancy Services
