Butler Group, one of Europe's top IT research and advisory organizations, says the business community has failed to maximize the capabilities of business intelligence tools.
In a recent report, "Business Intelligence-A Strategic Approach to Extending and Standardising the Use of BI," Butler says that most BI deployments were brought in to deal only with departmental data control.
"The era in which the isolated use of multiple BI tools can be relied upon to support enterprise decision making is outdated, inefficient and must come to a close," says Andrew Kellett, senior research analyst and author of the study.
In the BI arena. data has no intrinsic value unless it can be used to support business decisions. BI technology already provides a strong and supportable range of business focused tools and products. Utilized more efficiently, BI technology can support all types of business users irrespective of their data manipulation skills.
However, core BI usage has historically been viewed as the domain of a small number of IT-savvy power users, Kellett says. "To date we have merely scratched the surface of what properly deployed enterprise BI can achieve in support of the business, but taking that extra step forward will only become feasible once a number of hard business decisions have been made."
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