This year’s BI Survey (formerly OLAP Survey) from the Business Application Research Center shows that only 8% of employees are actually consuming BI technologies.  Even in industries that have aggressively adopted BI tools such as banking and retail, usage is at 11%.  Most BI software vendors claim an adoption rate of 20% or more.

More importantly, the business intelligence and data warehousing worlds have been promoting “information for the masses” for decades.  We have heard claims like providing “the right data to the right people at the right time” and “informed decision making”.  With all of the promises, the actual adoption rates of BI are an indictment of the entire BI industry.  The promises of BI remain valid and attainable but the industry in large part has not delivered on those promises.  As a BI consulting firm, we have looked seriously at BI adoption within our clients and what can be done to continually increase usage and value.

Arguably the single, most important success factor is to tie the BI initiative and its benefits to concrete business objectives.  This can be very difficult and as a result it is often not done.  Many people do not believe BI can directly drive business results (e.g. increase customer retention) and therefore its value cannot be quantified in terms of business objectives.  As a result, BI value statements are often limited to soft benefits such as number of users, frequency of use for a given dashboard, and similar benchmarks.  Completing the hard work of tying BI to strategic business objectives and quantifying the benefits BI provides to the business is critical to starting a BI project right and, more importantly, deploying business intelligence successfully.

Another reason contributing to low adoption rates of BI is many organizations failing to continue to sell the value and benefit of BI.  Selling BI begins with convincing management of the value in order to secure approval, funding, and other resources but it often stops there.  BI must be continually sold throughout the development of the application but also for months, even years, after deployment.  A good BI environment is continually evolving and improving, providing an ever-increasing amount of value to business decision-makers.  Communicating the information and benefits available to users, soliciting feedback on what needs to change or what new data needs to be added, and demonstrating concrete business value are all critical in increasing BI adoption rates after the initial launch. 

iBusiness Solutions' The Vision Builder™ is designed specifically to help paint a vision that is aligned with your organization’s strategic objectives, to sell that vision to the organization, and to continually refine and communicate that vision and its benefits to people throughout the organization.

A third factor contributing to BI adoption is the culture of an organization.  Even in a day when we are accustomed to the availability of free-flowing information on the internet, many people and organizations promote a culture of protectionism as opposed to one of openness.  Aside from security and confidentiality where it’s needed, many organizations have vast opportunities to increase the flow of information. The Information Maximizer™ can help you identify opportunities to “visually drive decision-quality information higher up, further down, more widely across, and outside the enterprise”™. The reasons for low BI adoption rates discussed here are focused on the business side of the organization.  The IT side of the organization is not an innocent bystander and I will cover a few reasons from that perspective in my next posting.

There is no single, easy answer to the issue of undelivered BI promises so I would love to hear your thoughts.  Post a comment here or email me.