How Valuable is Business Intelligence to the Enterprise?

Overall, business intelligence is an IT success story: Our most recent IT spending survey found that BI spending is increasing more quickly
than spending on any other application. This month’s survey reveals that 72 percent of users say their BI efforts have had a major and measurable
impact on their companies’ bottom lines. But not all business intelligence goals are being met, and there are problems beneath the veneer of
satisfaction.

An overarching
question in this year’s BI survey
is: Are companies
learning how to use BI better? The good news is that experience counts. The longer a company uses BI, the wider BI usage spreads within the organization, the more the organization tries to do with the technology and the bigger the technology’s contribution to the bottom line. That’s just what CIOs would hope to hear. This year’s survey also looks into the practices companies follow to achieve their BI goals.

We see a correlation between experience with BI, data quality
and development
of a clear strategy and vision
for business intelligence use. Still, many long-time BI users report
problems. Issues
of integration, accessibility and bringing users up to speed on how to analyze and use BI data dog this technology.
The value of BI increases with experience, but even veteran
BI users see room for improvement, and opportunities to gain more value from BI.

Top 5 Ways To Increase BI Value

How the survey was done:
CIO Insight designed the 2007 Business Intelligence Survey with members of the Ziff Davis Enterprise research staff. IT executives from Ziff Davis Enterprise publication lists were invited to participate in the study by e-mail. The questions were posted on a password-protected Web site, and 241 qualified respondents (89 from companies with revenues in calendar 2006 between $5 million and $100 million; 74 from companies with revenues between $100 million and $999 million, and 78 from companies with revenues of $1 billion or more) replied from August 12 to August 30, 2007. Of the respondents, 49 percent were the top IT executives of their companies; the rest held other IT executive positions.

Finding 1: The BI Learning Curve Has Just Begun

Finding 2: Effectiveness Is a Sometimes Thing

Finding 3: BI Success Depends on Execution

Finding 4: Garbage In, Bad Intelligence Out

Finding 5: Weak Links in the BI Chain

Next page: CIOs Are Under Moderate Pressure to Cut Costs