Return on investment (ROI) is the primary concern among SA companies in determining the success of their business intelligence (BI) initiatives.
This emerged from ITWeb`s Business Intelligence 2004 Survey, which ran across www.itweb.co.za for three weeks during May. The results of the annual online BI survey, the third such survey undertaken by ITWeb, were released at a function in Johannesburg yesterday by ITWeb editorial director Ranka Jovanovic.
Other speakers at the event included Bill Hoggarth, SAS MD, Susan Andre, Alicornio Africa MD, Estelle de Beer, Sybase BI Practice manager, and Johan Cloete, Cognos business development manager.
The 247 ITWeb subscribers who completed the survey rated efficiency and ease of use as the second and third most important criteria when assessing their BI implementations. However, despite ROI being rated as a major concern, almost half of the respondents were "not sure" whether their implementations had delivered a return or not.
"Each year the survey attracts a greater number of respondents and increased interest from the local vendor and user communities," said Jovanovic.
This year 50% of respondents held executive or operational management positions and almost half of those who completed the survey were employed by companies with 500 or more staff members. Over a third were in the mature deployment stage of BI initiatives, 20% had begun their initial roll-outs and 23% were currently considering implementing a BI solution. Only 11% of the respondent base had no plans to get involved in a BI project in the near future. Of interest, said Jovanovic, was that the decision-making process around BI investments had definitely shifted from IT to business executives.
Hoggarth stressed that those individuals within companies that had easy access to the right information were able to perform far more effectively than those who did not. He advised companies to look for stability, a long-term focus, and consider the full value cycle when deciding on a BI vendor. When assessing an ROI, they should take cognisance of the overall cost of the proposed solution, as software licence fees often only made up "a small part" of the final spend. "Accept that a business intelligence project is never ending," said Hoggarth, adding that he would advise users to "choose a vendor that is prepared to share the risk."
Andre said that among the factors that were fuelling change in the BI market were the need to reduce costs, compliancy requirements, the need to support distributed workforces, the demand for decision-making not being tied to a physical device, and the current rate of change of business. Vendors were having to relook their offerings in the face of a growing demand for real-time business intelligence, she said.
De Beer said often the size of a company dictated how information was used. For small to medium sized concerns, it was an enabler, while mid-market companies generally use information as a management tool, she said. Corporates viewed and used information as a competitive weapon. In an environment where legislation was demanding companies to store their data for longer and where the growth in data continued to climb, it was important that companies decided how best to use their information in terms of what they required from it, she said.
Cloete said more and more companies were now demanding solutions that could assist with future projections, as opposed to those that merely captured information that gave a retroactive view of the business.
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