Business Intelligence: Current Generation of BI too Limiting for Agile Organizations

Monthly canned reports just aren’t cutting it for many organizations any more.  It’s not that those reports aren’t useful, it’s more that organizations are realizing that the canned reports can’t answer all the questions that they have.  Organizations are frustrated that they have data, but they’re not able to extract from it all the things they’d like too.  Most organizations would also like to be able to make their data more widely available than just a select few who have been trained to use their BI application.  Ideally they’d like to be able to drill into and analyze their data in much more flexible and ad hoc ways than they currently have been able to do.

A recent Forrester Research report concludes that “agile companies” are being hampered by their current BI tools.  They would be better  supported by more “agile business intelligence” tools.  The generation of BI tools most widely used now are too complex for “casual use” by most knowledge workers.  Often IT needs to get involved to help set up and alter queries and reports or add customizations based on changing business needs.  In fact, 46 percent of the time when there is a request for a change inthe BI software IT needs to get involved.  And when business needs change quickly, IT becomes a bottleneck in the process.  66 percent of companies say that IT is too swamped with requests to alter BI software to meet the needs of the company in a timely way.

The report criticizes current BI tools as being too inflexible for the following reasons:

Information is scattered and too hard to find. Often so much time is spent finding data to analyze that there is little time left to think about how best to analyze the data itself.

Canned Reports are too limiting. As often as 49 percent of the time the questions that need to be answered require free-form data queries rather than canned reports.

“Casual Use” Knowledge workers need “zero-training” UIs for BI Applications.

Changing the Base Data Modeling and Design of the BI system is usually complex. 54 percent of IT staff found it complex to make changes to the underlying BI software data models.

Ever-changing Business Requirements Make it Impossible to Keep Up. 70 percent of respondents say that business requirements change daily/weekly/monthly.

Complexity often means BI requests are not completed until days or weeks after the request. Only 22 percent of all requests can be fulfilled within hours.

The report finds that next-generation BI tools will be more intuitive to use, be based on databases built from the ground up to support BI, and be more data driven than database schema-driven.  That should make them easier to use, easier to create new models with, and easier for performing ad hoc data analysis.