Business Intelligence at crossroads, says analyst

Organisations need to integrate technology

Business intelligence (BI) is reaching a crossroads, according to Butler Group researchers

Business intelligence (BI) is reaching a crossroads, according to analyst Butler Group.

The company, which is holding a BI summit in Amsterdam next month, says businesses need to integrate the technology in a more organised and embedded way.

Tim Jennings, Butler Group's Director of Research and keynote speaker at the event, says business organisations need to think much harder about creating an integrated and comprehensive approach to BI.

'BI is about providing information and insight into the core processes of a business. If you look at any organisation of any size, they've got bits of BI dotted around all over the place,' he said.

'We've seen it is not uncommon for people to have ten or more different BI tools in place, and typically they have been implemented as point solutions. They're usually difficult to use, and the output is tailored to a specific business problem, they are inaccessible for casual users.'

Jennings says he is advocating a more strategic view of BI place in the enterprise environment.

'Business these days runs at a faster pace, and people are being asked to make ordinary business decisions. Potentially, they could make choices better if they had easily digestible information, consistently available across the whole organisation, about the situation around them,' he said.