Business critical applications fail to meet firms' analytical needs
Computing research finds that 88 per cent of technology professionals are unhappy with the scope of analytics tools built-in to their CRM, ERP and other applications
The vast majority of technology professionals find that the analytics tools built-in to critical applications such as CRM and ERP are inadequate.
Computing's own research recently asked a pool of UK-based technology professionals at medium to large organisations whether their business critical applications meet current and future needs, and only 12 per cent responded positively.
Of those who found the tools in some way lacking, 47 per cent said that the built-in analytics were useful, but suggested they would like to see improvement on the level of analysis provided, suggesting that vendors of these products and services need to focus more on their analytics tools.
The remainder were even less complimentary, with 32 per cent finding the analytics static, and without a great level of insight, and a further nine per cent stating that the business critical applications at their firms contained no analytics functionality whatsoever.
This nine per cent of respondents were then asked how their analyse data and create reports, since analytics capabilities are not built into their mission-critical tools.
The research found that approximately two thirds of this group simply did not believe that they required business analytics at all. The remaining third were having to go through the labour intensive, slow and error-prone process of exporting data into tools such as Microsft Excel in order to generate reports.
Speaking at a recent Computing event, IBM high-performance computing and medical data expert, Janis Landry-Lane, argued that using Excel to analyse large volumes of data is a bad idea.