Business Intelligence is one of the most strategic areas for the next years. It's on every CIO's agenda, and usually, one of the "top five" proprities. This is one of the few markets in which there is not much difference between the Israeli market and other global markets.
In my interaction with CIOs, I see that even in these tough times (and possibly because of that), many of them have placed this area as a top priority for 2009-10. Even though IT budgets are most likely shrinking in 2009 (~10%), BI budgets are expected to grow or remain the same.
The following radar shows which areas are being used by most enterprises / large Israeli organizations (for example, typical BI/DW is used by most), which areas are in implementation phases, and which are “of interest” (or, in other words, are being examined):
According to a survey I conducted, BI was considered a main technology for 2008, similar to what global organizations said is a similar survey performed abroad.
In my frequent conversations with organizations re BI, I hear many great things about this area (unlike other application areas such as ERP etc.).
Here are some of the good stuff people are saying about BI:
- BI has become the most efficient way of extracting more value from existing or new applications. Some organizations make it a habit of incorporating BI services from day 1 to each new project they are launching, simply because it provides immediate value out of the application instantly, instead of waiting for the new application to stabilize first before providing analytics around it.
- BI Helps IT achieve better alignment with the business. Because of its nature, BI requires a lot of collaboration between IT and business units, it usually also gives business users what they want, and so helps IT be regarded as a more business aligned partner.
- BI created an organizational language. Some organizations (especially distributed or global) claim this is the most important benefit from their DW/BI.
- A central EDW creates a single version of the truth.
- CPM & Scorecard help the organization connect the day to day actions to the organizational strategy.
- Active BI (incorporation of BI services in applications processes) can help create better & smarter processes.
Here are the negative things people are saying on BI:
- BI is under-used in most organizations. Even in the more mature ones, organizations are not yet getting what they can get out of BI. Usually the mid-level management layer and business analysts are heavy users, but top management is only now starting to use dashboards, and the rest of the organization – knowledge workers – are not yet enjoying the benefits of BI. This has triggered the need in some places for a BICC.
- Stand-alone data marts create several data versions. This problem is actually not as common in Israel as in the U.S, as most organizations have created a centralized DW and are trying to keep it as much as possible. Still, large organizations find it difficult to keep a central DW at all costs, and have to deal with several data marts. These “centralized” data marts make it difficult to implement a cross-organizational initiative, such as a Balanced Scorecard.
- “Data Mining is only for experts” is a phrase I often hear. It is looked upon as a very complicated practice, and is used in “niche” areas – mainly marketing and fraud detection.
- "The data is not 100% reliable". Data Quality issues are affecting the reliability of the DW.
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