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People are key to BI success

Technology advancements alone are not enough to keep up with corporate data claims Gartner.

By Nicole Kobie, 31 Jan 2007 at 11:06

Business intelligence (BI) is not just about using technology to better analyse data, but about managing information, according to a leading research figure.

People and processes are as important as technology, Andreas Bitterer, analyst Gartner's research vice president told delegates yesterday at Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit 2007.

When it comes to BI - the use of software and technology to gather and analyse business data - companies need to stop focusing on which tool to use and instead think about whom to use.

Gartner suggests creating a BI competency centre made up of personnel in IT roles as well as the people who will be using the information, such as managers in finance, sales and marketing functions.

BI is also set to expand beyond corporate insiders. "It started with managers and executives, but now there are tens of thousands of users," said Bitterer.

Expanding BI to customers - such as some banks are doing, allowing customers to analyse their own statements - could result in an infrastructure capable of supporting millions of users, according to Bitterer.

He also noted that many organisations use too much software from a variety of vendors, but standardising across the company isn't easy. Application vendors make migration difficult because they don't allow standardised exporting of reports, leading some firms to migrate years of reports manually.

Bitterer forecast four main areas of change for BI. Volume will increase, requiring more disk space and bigger data warehouses - easy challenges to meet, thanks to technological improvements.

And it will happen quickly, he says. Velocity of data generation "will dwarf all we've seen." But the biggest challenge will be variety of types of information and where it's stored. "Companies can buy more technology to deal with volume and velocity, but variety is about the content - you can't just throw tools at it," he said.

The inconsistencies caused by a variety of information types leads to the fourth challenge, data validity. "Inconsistent data leads to bad decisions," Bitterer said, advising firms to "take data quality really, really seriously."