Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks company (NYSE: HHS) released “The 2009 State of the Market: Mid-Year Insights Report,” which includes significant findings on the business intelligence market. According to Aberdeen, business intelligence applications will have the highest impact for companies over the next two to five years.
Aberdeen reports the following on the state of business intelligence:
- Companies have business intelligence strategies that include integrating business intelligence with existing enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM.
- Business intelligence software is the predominant extension planned for ERP systems.
- Use of business intelligence is being driven by a number of business initiatives, including:
- Sustainability and green performance tracking.
- Field marketing and promotions tracking.
- Customer service and customer relations.
- Business intelligence projects are shifting from strategic to tactical, operational and business-unit specific.
- Not surprisingly, companies continue to measure return-on-investment (ROI) on business intelligence projects. Metrics tracked include:
- Sales performance metrics.
- Cost savings metrics.
- Customer performance metrics.
- Process efficiency metrics.
The report states, “One in four respondents identified in business intelligence/analytics as the software technology with the most pronounced effect on the business in 2009,” states David Hatch, vice president, technology research at Aberdeen Group. “Companies are finding that business intelligence has many uses within the organization, but the barriers to success lie in the ability to make access and use pervasive. The top performers are focusing efforts on creating a self-service approach to business intelligence that enables non-technical workers to obtain information and analytic capabilities without burdening the IT staff.”
This Aberdeen report surveyed 1,607 executives from 36 countries. More than 550,000 locations were reviewed, with 90 of the Fortune 1,000 and 75 percent of the Fortune Global 500. The report surveyed 407,000 panel members with 35,000 senior-level interviews. The report includes 640,000 benchmarks.
In addition to citing business intelligence as a key initiative, the report also found that enterprise application extensions and Software-As-A-Service are high priorities for CIOs.
Kelley Kassa
Spotfire Blogging Team
