Posted by Loraine Lawson Nov 2, 2009 5:04:05 PM
Despite economic concerns, analysts predicted business intelligence would be a top tech priority this year. And apparently, it has been.
But it’s fall, and with fall comes the harvest and even though modern business isn’t what you’d call an agrarian pursuit, inevitably, there comes a time to ask: Are we reaping what we’ve sown?
When it comes to BI investments, it seems harvest isn’t turning out as well as many hoped when the year began.
A recent report from the UK shows that companies there aren’t very happy with the yield of their business intelligence investments. Data technology research company Kognitio found that a majority of the 200 companies it surveyed spent at least half a million pounds ($819,000) on BI implementations. One in four actually spent more than a million pounds (that’s approximately 1.6 million dollars).
Yet – these investments aren’t providing the expected value, according to the survey. It’s one thing to disappoint, but 62 percent fessed up to receiving “a barrage of complaints from their business users.”
Now that’s what my grandparents would have called “a bad crop.”
What’s wrong?
IDC analyst Dan Vessett says part of BI’s problem is a people issue, not a technology issue. “The technology has been around for a long time. It’s the people that often get in the way,” Vessett said during a speech at Computerworld’s Business Intelligence Perspectives. He identified a number of cultural factors that can contribute to BI’s success or failure, including the involvement of non-executive employees and user satisfaction with the dashboard.
After reading the Kognitio UK survey, David Linthicum expressed a similar view:
Linthicum offers four steps IT can take to foster BI success:
- Understand the business users’ needs – and in detail.
- Resolve data quality issues.
- Focus on master data management as an ongoing effort.
- Delight users by going above and beyond.
Maybe technology isn’t the problem. But his last item makes me wonder if technology could be part of the solution.
After all, Vessett points out that design quality is a key component of BI success:
This made me think that perhaps, just perhaps, a big part of this problem could be solved by making integration and reports easier for business users. In fact, data integration was one of the two reasons companies had to get a grip on BI costs, according to a 2008 Aberdeen Group survey. The second issue:
delivering BI tools to end users.
Both of these are issues that mashups purport to do, which leads me to this question: Could mashups play a role in making BI more successful?
Last week, I wrote about how companies are applying mashups to BI, but what really made me ask the question was IBM’s recent release of IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service and an updated version of IBM Mashup Center.
As for the updated IBM Mashup Center, it sounds like it could be more user-friendly. It includes a new browser tool that lets users create their own widgets. Additionally, it will support integration with RESTful services and include connections with new data sources, eChannelLine reports.
You can read more in an excellent roundup of IBM’s new mashup offering by my colleaque, Ann All.
Of course, IBM isn’t the only company in the business of melding mashups with BI – it’s just most recently in the news. As I shared last week, more companies are applying mashups to BI and, as a result, more mashup success stories are emerging, including how the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency uses JackBe’s mashup tool to map strategic information and how Pfizer Pharmaceuticals uses Composite Software’s Composite Information Server for mashups.
Related posts:
- IBM aims to connect corporate mashups and business intelligence Posted by Larry Dignan @ 8:58 am IBM on Tuesday...
- Applying Mashups to Business Intelligence Posted by Loraine Lawson Oct 29, 2009 4:27:41 PM Enterprises...
- Connecting Cognos and Lotus With Data, Mashups and Social Interaction Written by Alex Williams / October 27, 2009 10:35 PM...
- Data Warehousing and Data Integration TDWI Survey Report Collaborative Data Integration: Coordinating Efforts within Teams...
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 8:39 am and is filed under Business Intelligence News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
