A couple of years ago, it was hard to miss the phrase, "BI for the masses." Vendors promoted the idea of spreading BI analytics out of the traditional realms of business analysts and giving it to anyone who needed to analyze data, patterns or transactions.
Are we there yet? We checked with Wayne Eckerson, Director of Seattle-based TDWI Research, who wrote the recent report "Pervasive BI: Techniques and Technologies to Deploy BI on an Enterprise Scale." His answer? Slowly but surely.
Three years ago, 18% of users within enterprises surveyed used BI. These were what Eckerson calls "power users": financial analysts, departmental super-users and marketing and sales analysts. Today, the penetration rate is 24%. The increased numbers come from new users, including executives, managers and customer service agents.
"There's obviously a ways to go," admits Eckerson. "Most companies deploy BI tools to power users because they're the ones who clamor for it the most. Everyone else tends to use spreadsheets, but those are problematic" because of inconsistency of information and the frequent inability to share them.
Other stumbling blocks that hinder wider deployment relate to usability and project management.
"Usability encompasses a range of dimensions, from architecture, design and support to change management," he says, adding that people will frequently generate their own justifications for not using BI tools. "They may not trust the data. It may not be tailored closely enough to their needs. There may be another tool they like better."
Eckerson recommends ensuring that you deliver the right tools and interfaces to the right users. This can be a big challenge for IT. "Power users pick tools that are good for them but too complicated for everyone else. I'm a big advocate of performance dashboards because that's the way people want to absorb information."
The issue here, of course, is that making the interface more user friendly frequently requires a great deal of complexity underneath. IT departments do well creating the architecture but need to do better at creating the dashboards and interfaces. "They bake the cake, but they forget to ice it properly," Eckerson says.
For companies wanting to increase BI pervasiveness, Eckerson recommends building a BI competency center to establish skills and methodologies. He is seeing more of these being created, which is a good sign. He also sees leading-edge companies deploying BI on a wider basis, pointing out that Cisco Systems deployed BI tools for its quality control systems and increased the number of users from 1,200 in 2006 to 3,500 in 2008. In tracking and reducing quality control issues, Cisco cited a 35% to 40% improvement per user.
Eckerson mentioned GE Rail Services, a transportation-services division of General Electric, which deployed an enterprise BI platform to improve the efficiency of operational, commercial, financial and services aspects of the business. Its CIO, Bill O'Neill, has cited the platform as a way to define areas of improvement and measure the division's results, particularly against the parent company's ongoing quality efforts.
So, stay tuned: Eckerson expects companies to continue offering BI not only to more employees but to customers and suppliers as well.
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