Finding 5

Finding 5
Weak Links in the BI Chain
In addition to data management and quality issues, CIOs must be concerned about strategic vision, integration, usability and weak points in the BI cycle. It's startling to see that fewer than 40 percent of companies know what they hope to achieve with BI and how they plan to use it. This sets up BI for alignment problems, such as defining BI goals, and clearly affects the contribution BI makes. Lack of integration affects more than one BI user out of three and—no surprise here—it's especially a problem with companies in which data quality is lacking. Companies are much better at collecting and organizing data than making it usable or putting it to work. No wonder 58 percent of respondents say users don't know how to analyze or interpret BI data.