Let's get real - it's about the department, not just the enterprise

Continuing the last conversation about the issues raised in Doug Henschen's  Information Week article called Business Intelligence Gets Smart. The first thing that was really noticeable was the emphasis that big companies placed on ease of use and affordability for even their enterprise deployments.   Today I'd like to talk about the second observation from his article- many enterprise deployments are really departmental deployments.

Yes, many companies have the ultimate vision of the universal BI implementation that touches all data, providing glorious real-time dashboards to executives, relevant reports to managers, and critical slices of data to front-line employees.  It's a wonderful vision.  It's also expensive, complex, and time consuming, and it's not really clear that anyone's even gotten close to it yet.  Valiant attempts have been made, and those attempts are yielding value, but the vision is yet unfulfilled.

Reality is something different.  More companies are approaching their business intelligence needs in a more tactical, concrete way.  They want something that's faster to deploy, easier to use, and provides tangible value quickly.     Take a look at Doug's chart, below.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="298" caption="Departments outnumber the enterprise."][/caption]

A few quick takeaways:

• 67% of companies are using BI in one or just a handful of departments.


• Only 11% have a "pervasive deployment."

Especially in the difficult economic environment that we have today, companies are going to think carefully and tactically about their technology investments, and BI will be no different.   What we are already seeing is a heightened interest in departmental or cross-departmental solutions, linking together information from marketing, sales, and finance, for example, so that executives can see campaign to pipeline to revenue.

It also explains the increasing interest in departmental level BI solutions, such as in-memory analytics and on-demand business intelligence. I covered what "easier business intelligence" is last time, so I just want to repeat two points - integration and scalability.  The vision of the overarching business intelligence deployment continues to be a worthy goal.  Organizations will just build departmentally to get there.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Running a three legged race with 2 people is easier than an 8 legged race with 7 people. Just be sure you can do the latter if you want to go there."][/caption]

In order to ensure that your business intelligence solution is still valid as you grow, your resources and capabilities improve, or your data expands, you just need to pick a solution that can pull together disparate systems and easily scale.

So when independent analyst David Raab conducts a webinar asking "Does On-Demand Business Intelligence Make Sense?" the "Get Smart" chart leads me to believe that more people will be raising their hands to say that yes, it does.

Big companies need "easy" and "affordable" BI too, says Doug Henschen

Someone recently drew my attention to an Information Week article by Doug Henschen entitled Business Intelligence Gets Smart. In it, he covers a number of BI success stories as well as some results of a BI survey.  The results are so fascinating, I think I'll do a few posts on it, starting today.

The first thing that really spoke to me was the listing of impediments to BI success.  While Lyndsay Wise just did an article pointing to ease of use and affordability as the main desires of small and medium sized businesses, Doug points out that big BI implementations share the same desire.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="291" caption="The "Why I Need a Beer" list of the BI battle scarred."][/caption]

Complexity of BI tools and interfaces have a magnifying effect in an implementation:

• Complexity chews up IT time and expertise


• It drives up the consultant budget


• It makes it harder for business end users to use, so that BI is not as broadly used or helpful as it could be.


• Complexity rebounds back on IT, which ends up having to make more reports and dashboards for the business users.

Like complexity, cost also has a negative multiplying effect:

• High cost means that you can spread BI to fewer users, limiting its effects


• HIgh cost encourages smaller departments to go with their own tactical BI implementations, leading to vendor creep.  This works for the department in the short term, but can make things difficult if those various vendors don't integrate well with each other.


• High cost drives down ROI and is a sore point in this economic climate, making it difficult to get future projects approved.

Just to clarify, it's not necessarily bad to have multiple vendors or focus on departmental/tactical BI.  Even Howard Dresner, the guru of the BI industry, emphasizes the need for a "portfolio approach" to business intelligence across an organization.  The issue is when *every* department is using different vendors and it's hard to either scale these implementations or link them together sensibly.  It makes sense to do those quick, easy wins, but with a vendor that can scale, handle multiple data sources, and easily extend to other departments.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="262" caption="Why can't I get easy and affordable too?"][/caption]

So what is easier business intelligence?  For us at Birst, that means easier for IT and easier for the business user:

• Having a solution that better integrates data sources


• It automates more of the implementation phase of BI, easing the pain


• Fast implementation, so that benefits accrue quickly


• Designed for use by business users- an easier to understand interface, easy dashboards, ability to export toPDF or Excel


• Capable of advanced analytics, but only showing that complexity when really necessary


• Scalable, from a group/department level to the entire enterprise

When you also factor in the desire for affordability, I expect that even the largest companies will express interest in easier, budget-friendly BI this year.