More Wisdom of BI Crowds

Last summer research from Dresner Advisory Services found business users taking more of a leading role in the selection and deployment of business intelligence solutions. This was no fluke, as the trend is even more pronounced in Dresner’s latest research. Business users are seeking solutions that are easier to buy, quicker to deploy and simpler to use. Often they buy such solutions from emerging vendors rather than giants like SAP or Oracle. Business users are also driving demand for better process integration, mobile support, in-memory technology and collaborative capabilities.

Click through for the latest BI survey results from Dresner Advisory Services.

IT still exerts a lot of BI influence, but its role is declining. Meanwhile, influence is growing in other areas of organizations. The trend is most pronounced in North America, but other areas of the globe are beginning to follow suit.

Another trend that remained the same is a shift away from big BI implementations in favor of smaller ones. Dresner sees a new “center of gravity” for deployments developing, with installations for between six and 50 users growing as the largest and smallest implementations decline.

The proliferation of multiple BI tools continues.

Dresner notes an apparent decline in new BI implementations for 2011 over 2010, with much of the market growth coming from the expansion of existing implementations.

While growth in BI deployments for SMBs declined a bit from last year’s survey, they are still implementing BI at an above-average wage. Growth in really large organizations (5,001-10,000 employees) appears to have doubled.

For new BI deployments, products from open source and emerging vendors saw the biggest gains.

Integration with operational processes; data mining and advanced algorithms; and in-memory analysis topped the list of related technologies/initiatives considered most important. Less important were open source and software-as-a-service.