While most companies indicated they will increase their spending on business intelligence (BI) over the next year, many attributed failed BI implementations, BI underperformance, and the inability to meet the needs of BI end-users to a lack of IT resources, according to a recent survey by LogiXML, the pioneer of web-based business intelligence software.

When LogiXML asked 575 professionals across several industries about their BI experiences, it found that overall dissatisfaction with existing BI was fairly widespread. Forty-nine percent of respondents who identified themselves as a non-technical senior executive, business manager or business user said they were dissatisfied with IT’s ability to deliver BI functionality. Thirty-three percent of respondents who identified themselves as a technical manager, executive or developer said they were dissatisfied. A combined 68 percent of non-technical respondents were dissatisfied or indifferent with the responsiveness and support of their BI vendor; fifty-three percent of technical respondents were dissatisfied or indifferent.

When asked what their greatest impediment to successfully deploying BI was, a combined 42 percent said they didn’t have the IT staff resources available or that it was technically challenging, while 27 percent stated it was cost prohibitive. Company IT departments that were seeing an increased demand for BI within their organizations were, for the most part, adding more technologies (37 percent) or not meeting the demand (32 percent). And while 40 percent of respondents embed BI into their existing applications, the majority of those that do not—20 percent—said they don’t have the in-house expertise to do so.

“The findings we’ve compiled suggest that the overall need for BI continues to grow, but that companies are bogged down by traditional BI approaches that contain complex and costly platforms and data manipulation or tool sets with long development cycles—all of which require significant IT involvement,” said Brett Jackson, CEO, LogiXML. “Companies that don’t move away from cumbersome platforms like these to more agile BI solutions will remain dependent on already overburdened IT staff for their BI needs, and they will ultimately over invest in and under utilize their BI technology.”
Most companies—95 percent—use between one and four BI products. When asked how long it took to implement their last BI initiative, a combined 63 percent said it either took months or it took too long to remember. Only nine percent of respondents currently use mobile BI. Twenty-seven percent of those that are not using mobile BI stated they did not have enough in-house expertise to implement it.

According to 26 percent of respondents, the greatest problem with their current BI product was limited capabilities; 25 percent said they could not get to all of their data easily; and 25 percent said that the development cycle was too long and difficult.  The most important criteria for choosing BI were functionality (27 percent), cost (27 percent) and agility (23 percent).

Web-based technologies in BI technology were considered very important by most—66 percent. Feedback and collaboration in BI proved to be either very important or important for most respondents at a combined 81 percent. When it comes to having capabilities in BI technology similar to those in social media platforms, most were interested in sharing, commenting and annotation.

Compared to 2010, 45 percent of respondents said their company’s spending on BI would increase over the course of 2011; thirty-three percent said it would stay the same.
LogiXML conducted this survey from March 29 to April 8, 2011. For a complete copy of the results, click here.
LogiXML recently completed its ninth sequential quarter of growth. This also marks an 80 percent increase in overall growth in sales year-over-year for the company.