Business Intelligence 2003: Are Your BI Systems Making You Smarter?

• 60% say they’re poor or fair at making BI accessible to employees
• 66% believe it’s critical to analyze and report operational data in real time
• 71% believe technology can effectively structure unstructured market data
• 81% of companies plan to increase their business intelligence efforts

With almost two thirds of companies making organized efforts to collect, analyze and distribute business intelligence, the discipline is now firmly entrenched in the mainstream of corporate processes. But all is by no means perfect yet. According to the more than 570 IT executives who responded in February to our first survey on business intelligence, the effort to collect and analyze internal performance information scores highest in both usage and satisfaction, with customer intelligence efforts second and competitive intelligence third. As with many business technologies, our respondents are comfortable with the accuracy of the information they collect, though they report greater success at analyzing the information than at gathering it or distributing the results to executives. And just two thirds of our respondents’ business colleagues are satisfied with the information they get. Business intelligence has already proved to be a powerful tool for analyzing information critical to corporate strategy—that’s why most companies plan to increase their BI efforts. The next step is to make sure everyone gets the information they need.