Results From BeyeNETWORK Survey: State Of Business Intelligence [RESEARCH]

Posted by kirsty on May 3, 2011 in Blog, Business Intelligence | 1 comment

Richard Herschel presents the results of the first State of Business Intelligence survey conducted by the BeyeNETWORK and Saint Joseph’s University.

The survey was conducted between November 2010 and January 2011, and 79 BI professionals responded. Participants were solicited from the BeyeNETWORK’s membership and from TDWI’s Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Discussion Group on LinkedIn.

Where did the responders come from?

We put some of the data into Bime and created some visual representations of the results so you can more easily see what the numbers mean.

What were the results?

When asked, “What phrase best describes BI activity in your organization?” the responses from these participants were as follows:

• Our BI team responds to most projects but business users also use BI tools to address their needs – 33%
• Our BI team responds to all project requests and delivers the results to business contacts – 26%
• Our BI team primarily mentors clients in the use of BI/analytic tools -11%
• Our BI capabilities are fully automated within our operational systems – 2.8%
• Our BI capabilities are inadequate – 25%
• Other – 2.2%

When asked what BI technologies their organizations use (Note: respondents were asked to check all that applied):

• 69.4% said that dashboards are used for process monitoring and highlighting exceptions
• 65.3% said that decision support for drill down and what-if analysis is utilized in their work
• 56.9% state that their firm employs data mining/analytics
• 19.4% say that automated agents are used to drive rule-based business strategy via integrated processes

Participants were then asked, “To what extent does management in your organization employ business intelligence as the basis for their decisions?” Their responses were:

• Rarely, if at all – 7.1%
• Rarely, if at all – 7.1%
• About half of the time – 32.9%
• Most of the time – 27.1%
• All of the time – 10.0%

The survey then asked how business intelligence was used to support applications. The questions were designed to separate applications that were strategic, tactical, or operational in their focus. The results were as follows (Note: respondents were asked to check all that applied):

Strategic BI Applications:

• Strategic planning – 60.6%
• Product/market analytics – 63.4%
• Market trends and intelligence – 53.5%
• Supply chain analytics – 32.4%
• Other -11.3%
• None or don’t know -12.7%

Tactical BI Applications:

• Performance Management – 57.1%
• Marketing – 52.9%
• Forecasting – 48.6%
• Operations Planning – 45.7%
• Line-of-Business pricing and profitability – 44.3%
• Other – 10.0%
• None or don’t know – 8.6%

Operational BI Applications:

• Financial analytics – 70.4%
• Sales analytics – 66.2%
• Operational analytics – 50.7%
• Customer relationship management – 46.5%
• Customer service – 35.2%
• Quality analytics – 32.4%
• Supplier analytics – 25.4%
• Security/Fraud detection -16.9%
• Other – 4.2%
• None or don’t know – 4.2%

Participants were then asked to rate items relative to how their organization found the following factors to be of importance in achieving success in BI efforts. Their responses were as follows:

The final questions addressed how BI professionals saw the field changing in the next 12 months. The results are shown below:

For the original article please click here.