Bad data scuppers business intelligence usage

Gartner has estimated that worldwide spending on BI, analytics and performance management software grew 4 per cent in 2009

Business intelligence (BI) tools are oversold, under-utilised, do not deliver sufficient return on investment (ROI) and often produce inaccurate, poor-quality data, according to experts, forcing disappointed end users back into using spreadsheets to collect and report information on a departmental basis.

Nor should the IT department get involved in a BI selection and implementation process which is best left to CIOs, who additionally have to deal with nervous employees who drag their heels in embracing BI tools for fear that automated reporting will make their own job function redundant.

De Villiers Walton is a software consultancy specialising in SAP BI and CRM projects, often called in to identify and fix performance issues with SAP’s Business Warehouse BI application at large private companies.

The company’s founder and joint managing director, Daneel De Villiers, says many companies are not making the best of the BI tools they have installed because they are poorly designed and do not deliver information in a format that matches the individual business need.

“It is a classic case of oversell. The client is not sure of what they want,” he said, adding that the reason people are not using BI is that the requirement was for information across the entire business, but it only delivered data from one part of the business.

“There is a lack of data quality, which means companies are not getting the data they want, and utilisation and ROI are not what they should be,” added De Villiers Walton BI solutions architect Ian James. “If you put in a BI system costing £3m, you do not want three people using it.”

The company recently signed up a pharmaceutical customer that had implemented BI, but then drifted away from using the system and went back to the old way of reporting, often using Excel spreadsheets to store data pertinent to individual business departments that do not provide a centralised view of overall activity.

The annual Business Application Research Center (BARC) survey, which has been polling BI end users since 2001, confirms De Villiers assertions about poor utilisation and data quality. This year’s report, published last month (September 2010), gathered responses from around 2,200 end users and consultants in Europe and the US.

“Bad data has always been one of the top contenders, but in the past it has always been beaten up by complaints about query speed,” said Barney Finucane, a BARC analyst and lead author of the BI Survey 9.

“We were a little surprised it changed this year, and I think part of that is a general trend towards more complaints about organisation, rather than technical, issues.”

One element of BARC’s research which has remained surprisingly consistent from year to year is that BI software is extremely under-utilised by the companies that invest in it.

“Of the employees of the companies we surveyed, a shockingly low number actually use BI software – 8 per cent this year, 11 per cent last year, and 10 per cent the year before that,” said Finucane.

That under-utilisation may derive in part from a mismatch between what BI software does and what end users want it to do. De Villiers Walton’s James advises against the IT department getting involved in choosing or planning BI applications, arguing that the decision must be made by the non IT staff who will use them.

“IT do not know what business people want – the C-level executives understand it better, so you have to have the CIO on board,” said James. “The worst-case scenario is to get IT to implement BI.”

He also believes that corporate employees are wary of using automated reporting tools that could eventually make them redundant.

“There is a lot of job protection going on, with people saying ‘If I implement this they could replace my job’," he said. “People are very protective of their little silo and are worried they can be replaced by [automated] reports.”

Critics lambast BI provided by SAP, Oracle, SAS Institute, IBM and MicroStrategy, amongst others, as software that most companies do not actually need, largely because the required data can be stored in other software applications, like Excel, and then be manually collated into larger reports from multiple sources.

Even so, research firm Gartner has estimated that worldwide spending on BI, analytics and performance management software grew 4 per cent in 2009, compared to 22 per cent in 2008.

And rival analyst firm IDC has predicted that European spending on BI software in 2010 will increase by 40 per cent compared to 2009, with companies in the financial services sector particularly keen to ramp up their BI investments.

There is also the argument that once companies have made friends with BI tools, they begin to learn how to get value out of them.

"The more mature a business is with BI, the more its hunger increases to do things with it. The companies that do not do much are those that have never really understood the benefits," stated Alys Woodward, programme manager for European business analytics and markets at IDC.