Harnessing the Wisdom of Business Intelligence

There’s a war on between IT organizations and business users for control over business intelligence. In many ways, this war reflects the divide between headquarters and individual business units, with IT departments typically on the side of central administration.

Yet, a new survey of worldwide business users from Dresner Advisory Services suggests that business users are actually winning the war. Most new BI projects appear to be not only small in scope, but also favor new emerging BI vendors that have bet on either open source applications or software-as-a-service.

In both cases, the cost of acquiring these tools is well within the reach of most departments. This doesn’t mean that centralized BI applications are going to fade away. But it does mean that at some point in the near future an accommodation is going to have be made between centralized and departmental BI application deployments that allows both types of BI application environments to leverage their respective strengths.

Click through for valuable insight into BI usage and products currently in the market.

As of late, sales and marketing have been leading the BI charge.

But IT still dominates most in terms of purchasing.

Most of the BI action these days is in smaller organizations.

The bigger the organization, the more BI tools they have.

Large scale BI projects are out of vogue.

There are a lot of relative BI newbies.

Emerging BI companies are gaining traction with end users.

Emerging vendors have a lot of traction in smaller companies too.

Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Tableau, QlickTech and Pivotlink have most new deployment momentum.

Small organizations are driving emerging BI vendor sales.

Oracle has a slight edge over IBM.

Information Builders holds the lead.

Dimensional Insight holds a slight edge.