Gartner identifies flaws in business intelligence
Gartner identifies flaws in business intelligence
Feb 4, 2005: Gartner has outlined seven vital flaws in the way in which enterprises worldwide are using business intelligence, but it has also offered advice on how to avoid them, after interviewing 1300 CIOS in more than 30 countries.
The results found that CIOs plan to increase spending on business intelligence by about six percent this year, and aim to use it strategically to drive business growth from 2005 to 2008.
Frank Buytendijk, the research vice president at Gartner, said: "If you ask organisations what they want to use BI for, better decision-making is the top answer.
"But most organisation are not making better decisions now than they did give years ago. The pressure from cost cutting and compliance has put a greater focus on BI, but businesses are still using it very tactically.
"Successful organisations realise that having a real vision for BI is the key to business performance and they use information as a resource implemented in their business culture."
The main flaws identified by Gartner are:
1. Data warehouses are often created by the IT organisation with little or no business involvement. As a consequence, organisations perceive the value of these to be low, so the business does not use them intelligently enough.
2. Buytendijk believes that many people hide behind spreadsheets, when they should use the pressure of compliance to achieve greater things, such as cleaning up data silos, and creating ownership of performance data.
3. Gartner predicts that through 2007, more than 50 percent of data warehouse projects will have limited acceptance. This means that data will not have proper attention attached to it, therefore the quality of it will not be known.
4. Gartner warned enterprises to not just trust one vendor's solution for providing the best business intelligence solutions and tools. It advised organisations cot compare applications from different vendors.
5. Business intelligence needs are often hindered by limitations, when they should be allowed to evolve more freely.
6. Advice has been provided by Gartner in terms of outsourcing. It predicts that through 2006, less than 10 percent of enterprises, where outsourcing could be a viable strategy, will be ready or able to outsource BI applications and operations completely.
It advised that organisations should avoid the temptation to outsource everything and should only outsource things that are not a core competency.
7. Gartner said that a management dashboard should be seen as the finishing touch, so that new technologies are able to communicate with other BI technologies inside and outside the organisation, as well as with other technologies such as business process management and application integration."
Gartner also had three key recommendations identified after give years of study drawn from thousands of customer interactions. These are: make sure you have senior level business sponsorship for BI; have a unified BI infrastructure and use existing wisdom and evolve your business initiatives.
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