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Business Intelligence: Does it Really Help?
On Friday we listed the top 9 ‘innovative information access’ companies as ranked by IDC. The interesting commonality among companies in the list was that half or more of them are classified as ‘Business Intelligence’ (BI) companies.
In this recessionary economy, Business Intelligence is one area that companies have been turning to to help provide an edge against their competitors. But have businesses that have tried to gain an edge with BI really done any better than those companies that haven’t use it? That’s the question that Aberdeen Research tried to answer.
Aberdeen interviewed 250 organizations and quizzed them about their business and also their tools and methodologies for running their businesses. From the results, companies were divided into three groups: the best performers who made up 20% of those studied, 30% in the bottom ‘laggard’ tier, and the remaining 50% middle-tier average performers. The criteria for dividing the organizations into the three tiers was based primarily on company operating profits and their ability to retain customers. Aberdeen’s goal was to compare the best performers to the laggards to see how the two differ in their approach to business.
The study found that the best performers were much more introspective. Those organizations that had a better understanding of their sales and marketing performance and their sales pipelines tended to be best performers. Organizations that tracked metrics around performance and their pipelines ranked high in the rating. And those companies that utilized BI to ‘slice and dice’ their data tended to rank very high.
The study also found that companies that emphasize marketing tend to perform significantly better than those companies that have cut back. The best performers are more than 42 percent more likely to spend on marketing compared to the laggard companies.
