Five factors that make pervasive business intelligence a winning wager

Evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions is growing. Fact-based decision making is spreading throughout commercial, nonprofit, and public sector organizations. The economic downturn is spurring organizations to examine ways of retaining customers, spending capital and operating budgets, and complying with regulations. However, over the long term, BI solutions will continue to be applied to optimize a wide array of processes in an effort to improve performance management and organizational competitiveness. An increasing number of organizations are making BI and analytics functionality more broadly available to all decision makers inside and outside the organization. Internally, more pervasively available BI solutions lead to greater accountability by all employees and greater consistency in performance management. Externally, relationships with supplier and partners can be strengthened through effective sharing of key performance indicators (KPIs). However, having pervasive BI means more than having the appropriate BI tools distributed to all stakeholders. In pursuit of pervasive BI, organizations should focus on the five key factors that can be directly influenced to increase diffusion of BI. These factors have to do as much with BI and analytics technology as they do with the related professional services for BI strategy and solution development, deployment, and maintenance.