A new report from the Aberdeen Group finds that more than half of business intelligence projects are delivered late and that many companies struggle to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, despite having several years of experience working with business intelligence. The report, based on data collected from 170 organizations using business intelligence in February and March 2011, reveals five primary areas where best-in-class organizations excel compared to others.
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- Process
- Process
Best-in-class organizations have a defined process in place to understand and document end-user requirements for business intelligence. This allows them to define a roadmap to meet those requirements, considering technology infrastructure, internal processes and information flows, including refresh frequency. Having a standard, but not rigid, project plan and conducting a formal post-project review are also cited as best practices in business intelligence process.
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- Organization
Although many best-in-class organizations use a business intelligence competency center to collect and leverage best practices and skills, they are twice as likely to have decentralized IT and analytic skills embedded in the business units. Companies have found that placing BI specialists and end users together benefits both groups. BI specialists gain a deeper understanding of business needs working with the actual data that business units will analyze and end users develop a better understanding of business intelligence tools and capabilities specific to the areas they focus on.
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- Knowledge Management
- Knowledge Management
While most organizations have a data warehouse, best-in-class enterprises also recognize that the data warehouse may not be suitable for providing timely information to end users. These organizations provide an operational data store that makes information more easily accessible. They are also three times more likely to provide self-service business intelligence tools to end users so that users can explore data and discover relationships in the data independently. Having good documentation of the data available for analysis is also a key differentiator for best-in-class companies.
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- Technology
- Technology
Three key areas distinguish best-in-class organizations around technology. First, they use end-user query tools more extensively than others. Second, they use dashboards that allow users to drill down and discover root causes of problems. Third, they are more likely to use analytic applications specific to business functions that combine solid metrics and a rich data set supporting those metrics.
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- Performance Management
- Performance Management
Best-in-class companies measure their internal customer satisfaction with business intelligence solutions. This might be done through formal post-project review sessions or using other survey methods. Less than half of the companies in the study are able to track their business intelligence costs against budget with any degree of confidence.
The Aberdeen study, Agile BI: Three Steps to Analytic Heaven, is available free for a limited time.
Steve McDonnell
Spotfire Blogging Team
