Business intelligence is turning in more contributions to enterprises in 2011, with an expanding net of users and maturing set of implementations since the funk of the recession two years ago, according to a new survey from BI Scorecard.
In “2011 Successful BI Survey,” BI Scorecard categorized and assessed answers from more than 600 respondents involved in business intelligence implementations at their respective enterprises. BI Scorecard, a business intelligence tool and strategy advisory, conducts the survey annually.
Thirty-four percent of respondents said BI significantly contributed to their company’s performance in 2011, a 9-percent jump from 2009, with other responses on contributions hovering around the same percentages as two years ago, according to the survey. Much of that business impact is being felt as a result of maturing implementations: impact was “significant” for 69 percent of enterprises with systems in place for at least a decade, while only 23 percent found business impact in their first year.
In a question on how enterprises gauged their BI deployments, 26 percent stated “very successful,” followed by nearly half at “moderately successful,” 22 percent as “slightly successful” and 5 percent as “failure.” Percentages rank nearly the same as responses to those same questions in 2009, including only a 5-percent bump in “very successful” deployments.
BI Scorecard Founder Cindi Howson says the slight bump in “very successful” BI deployments in the last two years comes from a mix of internal enterprise definitions and a recognition that “there is still so much more to do.” Howson says that success and business impact are related but not synonymous, and many organizations noted that they still have governance or data quality issues to work through with deployments.
“Many people associate BI success with technical architecture, program execution, as well as the business contribution. I think this is why business impact is rated higher than BI success,” Howson says. “IT people in particular are hesitant to say their BI initiative is ‘very’ successful because they know there are problems still to solve.”
The BI user segment has expanded greatly since 2009, according to the survey. Business and financial analysts (67 percent) continue to lead users in this year’s study, but gains in BI use were seen across the board, including executive use (50 percent) up 6 percent from 2009, field staff (41 percent), up 8 percent, and customers and suppliers (33 percent), up 17 percent.
