You probably know that business intelligence (BI) has been a hot topic for the last decade - topping the list of priorities in surveys by Gartner, SearchDataManagement.com and others. As a result, over 75% of organizations surveyed in the last SearchDataManagement.com survey had at least one BI tool.

But that doesn’t mean we can all pack up and go home. Significant challenges remain - and new challenges are emerging.

For example, our last SearchDataManagement.com survey found that BI is often only accessible to a small percentage of employees, generally analysts and executives. Then, over half of the organizations surveyed had multiple BI tools - but we hear they’re often completely siloed from each other. And anecdotally, our reporters hear stories all the time about conflicting, inaccurate data causing BI skepticism. While the promise of BI resonated from cubicles to corner offices in the last decade, BI professionals “in the trenches” have found that success elusive - much of it due to data problems. It’s become crystal clear that BI success hinges as much on a solid data management infrastructure as it does on data analysis and visualization. Otherwise, BI efforts have resulted in good old “GIGO” - aka garbage in, garbage out - and expensive, sometimes embarrassing, GIGO at that.

So, many organizations spent the last decade cleaning up their data: formalizing data management organizations, developing data governance programs, implementing smarter data quality and integration - and generally building an infrastructure that’s capable of delivering accurate, consistent, correct and timely data.

These data infrastructure challenges are far from solved completely - but now they are better understood.  And now that more organizations are in a position to actually leverage their data, many analysts and experts are welcoming the next era of BI.

What does that mean, exactly?

Much of the interest and action is in analytics. Analytics, once considered the black art of academics and scientists, has evolved to become business-ready thanks to technological advances such as faster, cheaper analytical hardware platforms, in-memory analysis, more user-friendly analytical tools and perhaps, a greater appreciation for analytics from the board room. Suddenly, many more game-changing activities are possible.

It’s now technologically possible and financially viable to set up a real-time, operational BI system where a customer service worker sees not only the history of a customer’s interactions and purchases, but their potential future - thanks to more sophisticated CRM analytics and predictive analytics (which over 30% of our SearchDataManagement.com survey respondents are implementing). Real-time BI (being implemented by 25% of respondents) and complex event processing can track and analyze key business events and automatically trigger alerts or other actions, enabling unprecedented agility. And self-service BI (in use by over 50% of respondents and planned by 25%) can put more analytical power in the hands of business users, allowing more exploration and experimentation with data - potentially leading to more innovation and improved decision making.

In this new era, BI and analytics have become a competitive imperative for organizations. Companies must honestly place themselves somewhere on the BI continuum - from completely lagging to still solving data problems to working out organizational BI strategies to taking on new analytics challenges.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Business Intelligence, Enterprise Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.