Business Intelligence has long been trumpeted as the answer to brand owners’ dreams, by identifying, extracting and analysing your data you can drive the business forward, but according to Gartner, BI has fallen victim to the oldest trick in the book – marketing hype.
In its Predicts 2012: business intelligence still subject to non-technical challenges report, Gartner estimates that by 2014, fewer than 30% of BI initiatives will align analytics completely with business drivers, despite this being the main BI challenge.
“The immediate future of the BI landscape is one of a disconnect between marketing hype about pressing challenges on the one hand and reality on the other,” said Andreas Bitterer, research vice-president at Gartner. “The need for analytics does not match most organisations’ skill requirements; vendor hype for cloud-based BI is not reflected in revenue and customer adoption; and there is a struggle between centralised and decentralised organisational models of BI delivery.”
Organisations often develop and deploy hindsight-oriented reports focusing on metrics that users may find interesting, but they do not represent the operational controls used to help business performance, Gartner warns.
The analyst estimates that cloud-based BI will account for just 3% of BI revenue by 2013, despite every major BI platform provider offering such a system.
Current adoption of “cloud BI” by organisations lags behind the expectations of cloud-based BI providers – research from the analyst shows that organisations that have already invested in on-premises BI infrastructure are hesitating to identify a segment of their BI initiative for which data can be moved into the cloud and reports and dashboards received from a cloud provider.
However, companies that have subscribed to a specific cloud application, such as CRM or help desk service, are more inclined to use BI functionality delivered by their cloud provider, as they see it essentially as an extension of the cloud application.
Businesses will also balance a centralised approach to BI with a decentralised model, according to Gartner, to balance the need for consistent data models with agility.
Bitterer said: “Data professionals should concentrate not only on the technological aspects of BI, but also on the severe lack of analytical skills. Second, they should use a ‘think global, act local’ approach in their BI programmes to provide the right level of autonomy and agility to avoid the bottlenecks that overly centralised BI teams create, while simultaneously establishing enough consistency and standards for enterprise-wide BI adoption.”
