Pervasive BI: Steps to Enterprise-Wide Business Intelligence

The Aberdeen Group recently conducted a research and wrote a good benchmark report, entitled Pervasive BI: Six Steps to Enterprise-Wide Business Intelligence, by David Hatch, Vice President, Group Director, Technology Research of the Aberdeen Group.

In the Executive Summary of the report, they define: "Organizations are facing pressure to deliver actionable information to the enterprise that is timely and effective toward meeting business goals. This requires that companies have access to the information, the ability to combine, aggregate and integrate the information, and deliver self-service access to BI for non-technical end-users when, where, and how they need it.

Aberdeen research conducted among over 7,000 users of BI during the past 18 months has revealed that a lack of IT resources and BI skill sets has resulted in projects that are delayed, over-budget, and are often lacking the data and information necessary to meet business goals. This study, conducted among 370 business professionals, will reveal the specific methods and approaches that top-performing companies are taking to improve the pervasiveness of business intelligence access, usage, and effectiveness."

Aberdeen begins the report defining a benchmarking for the Best-in-Class. In the report, they also define a benchmarking requirements to success, and the required actions. They uses 3 key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class companies: Self-Service Delivery of BI Capability, Penetration of BI Capabilities in the Company, and Time to completion of BI Projects. In the required actions, they make some specific recommendations, considering the companies must: solve data integration and modeling issues, wean users off of spreadsheets, and integrate BI within existing enterprise applications.

The report can be downloaded in the Aberdeen's site, with free registration required.

Improving Organizational Performance Management Through Pervasive Business Intelligence

The IDC published a good white paper entitled Improving Organizational Performance Management Through Pervasive Business Intelligence, sponsored by SAP Business Objects. The white paper considers that the evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions is growing, and the fact-based decision making is spreading throughout all organizations.

They identified five key factors that have the strongest influence on BI pervasiveness:

1 - Degree of training on the data, tools, and analytic techniques
2 - Design quality of the BI solution
3 - Prominence of data governance
4 - Non executive involvement in promoting the design and use of BI solutions
5 - Prominence of a performance management methodology

They also identified six pervasive BI indicators:

1 - Degree of internal use
2 - Degree of external use
3 - Percentage of power users
4 - Numbers of domains
5 - Data update frequency
6 - Analytical orientation

They defined a model with the relationship between the six pervasive BI indicators (dependent variables) and the five key factors leading to pervasive BI (independent variables).

The white paper can be downloaded, with free registration required.

In my opinion, Business Intelligence and Performance Management are critical during this time of tight economy, and increasingly important the companies to use BI and PM to make better decisions. In general, the organizations that are investing in BI and PM have a positive impact on their business performance.

The Inexorable March Toward Pervasive BI

Thursday, December 4th at 3PM ET, will happen a live Web broadcast presentation entitled The Inexorable March Toward Pervasive BI, provided by DM Review and hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson, in its program called DM Radio.

According DM Review: "Business intelligence will become pervasive. You can rest assured of that. The big question is: Who will get there first? Over the next few years, the answer will manifest itself in a list of the top-performing enterprises worldwide. So, what can your organization do to lead the way? Tune into this episode of DM Radio to find out! We'll speak with BI industry guru Mark Smith, CEO of Ventana Research, Dr. Larry Harris of Progress EasyAsk, Sami Akbay of GoldenGate Software, and Robert Abate of RCG IT about the ways that organizations can greatly improve their use of information systems. Attendees will learn:

- Strategies for encouraging an analytical culture
- The types of tools and technologies that can enable Pervasive BI
- Examples of how Pervasive BI improves efficiency and profitability
- Why BI penetration remains around 20 percent of the enterprise
- Which emerging trends will be game-changing."

In the DM Review website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.

Pervasive Business Intelligence: Are organizations really ready?

Search Data Management published an article last month, called Pervasive business intelligence: Are organizations really ready?, by Jeff Kelly, Search Data Management's News Editor, where he commented the new features launched by Business Objects, and questioned if the companies are ready to use pervasive BI.

According the Business Objects' executives:
"IT departments have invested huge sums to upgrade their data management and business intelligence infrastructure – building massive data warehouses, for example – and are anxious to capitalize on their investments by spreading analytics capabilities throughout organizations, and Business Objects is committing significant resources to making its tools easier for non-BI experts to use.
The challenge for us is to develop more and more applications that have analytics under the covers so the end user doesn't know there are in fact some algorithms going on behind the scenes."

I agree when they said: "For most organizations, extending BI and analytics capabilities to business users is, in fact, a significant cultural change. Even Business Objects customers that have embraced the concept of enterprise-wide BI recognize that making the transition requires considerable effort, namely employee training, both on the front and back ends."

I think the cultural change in the organizations is the main challenge to implement pervasive BI.