Less than 30 percent of the potential users of
organizations’ standard business intelligence (BI) tools use the technology,
according to Gartner.
This low take up is due to the fact that longstanding
tools and approaches to BI are often too difficult to use, slow to respond or
deliver content of limited relevance.
The consumerization of BI technologies could benefit
organizations by delivering a better fit and broader user appeal.
“The fact of the matter is that BI is not pervasive
and adoption is not in line with the investment made by most firms. Almost
every organization could improve, if its stakeholders had easier access to
well-integrated information, and if they analyzed that information to manage
performance and make decisions,” said James Richardson, research director,
Gartner.
People’s experience of interacting with Internet-powered
technologies changes their expectations of IT.
BI users want to be able to just pick up and use the
technology they don’t want to have to read the manual. This places a high
degree of importance on the human/computer interaction aspects of BI product and
deployment design.
Three key factors that can drive adoption of technology
can also discourage the sustained use of BI by its intended users, if weak or
absent.
If BI is hard to work with, or completely static (or
sometimes even if it just looks bad), users will stop using it.
If users are frustrated by delays in query responses or
report production, then they will be likely to stop using the BI tool (or
they’ll use it once each time they need to do some analysis, and simply load
its output into Excel).
If the BI platform omits information that users need, or
does not express content in line with their frame of reference, then they will
stop using it or, once again, use it to move (and probably add) data into a
spreadsheet for “correction.”
“A failure in any one of these areas can be the
cause of poor takeup, and goes some way toward explaining why just 28 percent
of users have adopted the organization’s standard BI platform of choice,”
Richardson said.
The concept of a single enterprisewide BI product
standard is flawed and organizations need to face the reality of overseeing a
number of BI platform components. It is inevitable that managing a portfolio of
BI applications will require more effort than is needed for a single platform,
according to Gartner.
However, the balance of capabilities offered
and the relevance to the business will justify the effort incurred by ensuring
a better match to end-user needs and, therefore, a greater return on investment
(ROI) in BI. The power of consumerization means that, in all but the most
locked-down of firms, portfolio management is an inescapable fact of life,”
Richardson added.
By Telecomlead.com Team
