New Report Finds That Ease of Use of BI and Analytics Tools Is Critical in Driving User Adoption

TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced the availability of a new BeyeNETWORK research report, "Ease of Use and Interface Appeal in BI Tools," by Cindi Howson, founder of BIScorecard. A key finding of the report is that "ease of use" plays a more important role in achieving high user adoption of BI and analytics tools than advanced BI features. Chevron is profiled as an example of a company driving high BI adoption rates through its use of the TIBCO Spotfire® Analytics Platform, offering an appealing user interface that is intuitive, highly visual, and easy to use.

Based on 255 survey responses, report findings represent users from a wide range of organization sizes, ages, job roles, and experience levels. According to Howson, ease of use and interface appeal are important factors in making BI more pervasive, particularly beyond the power user base. "When BI is hard, more time is spent learning tools and on routine tasks than on using the data for insight and business improvement," said Howson. "It's particularly telling that easy-to-use BI tools are rated as more important than BI features and analytic power."

Report findings reveal that an appealing interface makes the experience more enjoyable and greatly affects first impressions - critical for engaging new users. Howson includes an example of how TIBCO Spotfire® enabled business users at Chevron to visualize their data in ways never before possible, allowing them to discover ways to improve efficiencies in oil exploration.

Mark Ruths, senior staff geophysicist and technology coordinator at Chevron and an early adopter of TIBCO Spotfire, saw the potential of its analytics platform in 2001 to help Chevron better understand the cost of drilling operations and find ways to reduce costs. What started as a trial with a handful of users has now grown to 2,000 users and over 500 different uses.

"Ease of use is the number-one priority," says Ruths. "Chevron had a BI tool in place to run reports, but identifying patterns and opportunities for cost reduction was not easy. People have other applications they can use, and they have their current work processes. Change is hard, and if a tool is hard to learn, that's a big barrier. If it's easy to use, it keeps them working at it. It only takes a few 'ah ha' moments, and then they are hooked. They get value. The more you use Spotfire, the more value you get."

The case study featuring Chevron and a Spotfire overview, including product information on the latest version of its in-memory analytics platform, TIBCO Spotfire® 3.1, can be accessed at http://goto.spotfire.com/easeofuse.