DM Review Midmarket Business Intelligence Survey Results

BI Analyst

Information Management Online, September 15, 2008

Lyndsay Wise

WiseAnalytics recently conducted a survey targeted at midmarket organizations using or considering business intelligence (BI). The goal of the survey was to identify adoption rates, general awareness and satisfaction with BI in general and targeted midmarket solutions specifically.

DM Review participated in survey distribution through Web site and newsletter promotions. The information below represents a subset of the overall responses and is based solely on the answers provided by DM Review participants (87 in total).

Due to discrepancies between organization adoption, satisfaction and vendor marketing, it is difficult to identify what is actually occurring within midmarket organizations regarding their adoption of BI and perceptions of what is available within the market. Unfortunately, because of the years that exclusive enterprise BI solutions kept midmarket organizations from taking advantage of offerings, there is still a perception that BI does not address midmarket requirements. For instance pricing, ease of use and end-user experience are issues that organizations consider general barriers to adoption, even though several newer options exist, such as on-demand, targeted and less expensive solutions as well as embedded analytics that integrate with operational systems. Consequently, a gap exists between organizations’ perceptions and the actual solutions available.

The subset of results discussed in this article concurs with the fact that midmarket organizations are still learning about the benefits of BI for their organizations. Although solutions exist to meet their needs, there is still a long way to go to bridge the gap between marketing messages that purport low prices and ease of use with actual adoption of those views within organizations.

General Demographic Information

The Figures 1, 2 and 3 break down the survey respondents by industry, revenue and department.

Although the survey was targeted toward midmarket respondents, almost one quarter of participants fall into the enterprise category (23 percent). Because large organizations tend to work in silos regarding technology deployment, it is rare to see organizations that deploy BI organization wide. In most cases, deployments reside at the departmental level or are alternatively managed by the IT department.

This may explain why 55 percent of respondents work within the IT department. Although there is a push toward operational BI and having initiatives driven by business units, the fact remains that actual transition from IT towards business is still a number of years away. BI solutions have become ingrained in the organization infrastructure through data warehousing implementations as well as developing reporting and analytical applications based on that infrastructure. The shift to operational BI and the mass deployment of BI across the organization still only occur within a minority of organizations implementing BI.

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