Who uses Business Intelligence tools at the front line in business?
Bob Trevelyan
Startup Accelerator, Streaming Analytics, AI & Big Data, Risk Mgmt, RegTech, Business Intelligence, Value Discovery, Management, Security, FinTech, Compliance. IIoT,
Surprisingly few companies.
Do you know that less than 8% of the workforce use Business Intelligence tools? An extreme statement but adoption quotes from differing sources range from 4% to 40%.
Considering that Business intelligence in its many guises has been touted as a business savior for 20 years – any number less that 50% is testament to the failure of initiatives – mainly because they did not look at the overall business information asset.
The focus on the executive office with BI tools, while increasing their visibility (because of the target audience profile) has not pushed the capability down to middle management or to the field in most cases.
The middle management group generally has adopted BI almost as a shadow – using Excel spreadsheets and the like to support their decision making. However shadow BI has significant challenges – info is not shared, info is not current nor vetted by business process owners (eg the CFO).
There are many reasons for automating business intelligence gathering and dissemination. We often find that businesses select a 'solution' before they understand, prioritize and value in tackling the vast complex information that they (may or may not) know about their operations, competition, markets and clients.
The core problem in business is that the business continues to run with inadequate tools and approaches – like it has for the last 50 years, but the world is changing rapidly around us. Information amounts, availability, acceleration of information types are all challenges to individuals trying to make intelligent decisions.
There are many examples in the marketplace in which BI has significant impact on organization’s value. Traditional approaches to BI have created islands of information or silos. Even when with foresight, companies that have adopted big data, Business Intelligence solutions fail to adopt continual reassessment, prioritization and valuation of the efforts, and business units relapse into self contained solutions using tools like Excel spreadsheets.
However knowledge of the business requires cross-sharing of information and constant reassessment and measurement of results. But that information must be made readily available – not in reports, static spreadsheets or inflexible data bases