Despite business intelligence (BI) being a high business priority this year, a third of organisations don’t know how to measure the benefits of their analytics initiatives.
Research from IDC found, ironically, companies need to apply BI and analytics to measure the success of their BI projects.
Roger Llewellyn, CEO of data analysis firm Kognitio, said: This lack of understanding of the benefits that analytics can bring further heightens the weakness that business intelligence and analytics projects currently face: organisations see them as expensive, difficult to implement and hard to quantify.”
Recent research from Vanson Bourne showed that 65% of IT managers found BI implementations too expensive and uncovered a reluctance to apply BI and analytics to new areas, such as social networking use. Implementations also led to a barrage of complaints from users, 62% of respondents said.
Llewellyn suggested that opening up BI use to many more users rather than a few select analysts would make it the benefits far more visible.
Organisations need to make many things clear in advance. They need to have an unimpeded view of the expected business benefits of the technology. They need to decide beforehand how analytics will allow better targeting of data, better sharing of information and faster access to relevant insight. This will only happen if the disparate parts of the business, from the IT department to business areas such as sales and marketing, work together and are absolutely clear about what they expect,” said Llewellyn.
The IDC report identified differences across industries, with education and utilities managing to measure the effectiveness of the projects far more effectively than firms in the media and insurance sectors.
