Speaking to almost 700 attendees at its annual Business Intelligence Summit in London on Tuesday, Gartner said that forward-thinking organisations are looking to BI as a driver for business innovation and growth.
"Companies around the world have purchased more than US $40 billion worth of enterprise applications, including ERP, CRM and HR, during the past few years," said Colleen Graham, principal research analyst at Gartner. "This has generated significant volumes of data in support of the operational processes they automate. By investing in BI, companies can further leverage their enterprise application investments and turn the torrent of data into meaningful insight to better measure performance, respond more quickly to market changes and opportunities and comply with an increasingly complex regulatory environment."
Gartner also cautioned that significant inhibitors to the successful deployment and adoption of BI exist. It said that limited BI skills and competencies, combined with a perceived high total cost of ownership (TCO) and difficulty in quantifying the direct business benefits of better performance and improved decision making will continue to hamper adoption.
New findings from Gartner's 2006 survey of 1400 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) found that Business Intelligence was the most highly ranked technology priority in 2006, with CIOs reporting plans to increase their BI budgets by an average of 4.8 percent in 2006.
"BI is now part of an organisation's license to operate, as every enterprise needs to manage information," said Frank Buytendijk, research vice-president and conference chair at Gartner. "However, BI has not yet achieved the necessary level of strategic importance and is not included as an essential part of corporate planning activities. Moving forward, BI will become part of business innovation itself. Sharing information with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders increases loyalty and in many industries provides competitive differentiation. BI will become pervasive in operational and workplace applications as organisations seek to optimise their business."
To use BI to drive business transformation Gartner advised organisations to:
- Develop user skills and a culture in the use and analysis of information to be an integral part of achieving business objectives and driving transformation
- Change the way BI is integrated into business processes
- Change the way the information architecture and application portfolio are implemented and managed.
