- 32% of R&D teams regularly use four or more BI tools to do their work, leading all departments in 2020.
- BI’s importance in Manufacturing grew 38% in the last year.
These and many other fascinating insights are from Dresner Advisory Associates’ 11th edition of its popular Business Intelligence Market Study. The study is noteworthy for how well its findings quantify the shift BI strategies are taking from generating revenues to reducing costs and improving operational efficiencies. The study is based on interviews with respondents from the firms’ research community of over 5,000 organizations as well as vendors’ customers and qualified crowdsourced respondents recruited over social media. Please see page 14 for the methodology.
Dresner Advisory Associates is also one of the few research firms making their ongoing research of COVID-19’s impact on analytics and BI spending available free to the public. You can find their free updates on the Dresner Community Site.
Key insights from the study include the following:
- Operations, Finance, the C-Suite, and Sales are the top drivers of BI adoption in enterprises today. Looking for new ways to reduce costs and more accurately interpret operational decisions’ impact on financial performance, the departments most driving BI adoption are Operations and Finance. Organizations I’ve spoken with what to know how operational decisions made in their core business impact their financial performance in real-time. BI is the approach they’re taking to make this happen
- Reporting, dashboards, data integration, data warehousing, and data preparation are top technologies and initiatives strategic to BI in 2020. Dresner’s research team looked at 41 different technologies and initiatives that are strategic to BI. Respondents’ ranking of these 41 factors reflects BI maturing across the enterprise landscape evidenced by data integrating, data warehouses, and data preparation being high priorities. Second-tier initiatives include self-service, advanced visualization, data discovery, data storytelling, and cloud. The lowest priorities in 2020 include voice and video analytics, RPA, edge computing, complex event processing, IoT, and social media analysis.
- The top ten technologies and initiatives strategic to BI in 2020 are projected to see spending increases over last year. Further proof that BI’s maturity rate is accelerating in enterprises is seen in the graphic below. The top ten technologies ranked the most valuable from a strategic standpoint by enterprises are projected to see continued investment in 2020. While this may appear intuitive, the fact that their budgets didn’t get trimmed shows that C-suite executives and leaders see BI delivering value today.
- Retail/Wholesale enterprises dominate all other industries in their adoption of sales planning and in-memory analytics, as many are having to redesign their supply chains, multichannel selling, and services strategies today. Technology-based enterprises dominate all others in their adoption of cloud technologies. Healthcare dominates in its adoption of Human Capital Management (HCM) or people analytics.
- Martech (marketing technology) is driving a continual increase in BI’s adoption in marketing over the last eight years as more enterprises look to quantify the financial contribution of marketing strategies. Operations are the most effective department at getting BI adopted in an enterprise. Finance and the C-Suite follow as their collaborative focus is on knowing how their strategies drive financial performance. Over the last eight years, marketing has become more measurable thanks due to martech’s proliferation of applications, platforms, and technologies, as Scott Brinker’s excellent annual analysis of the landscape shows. Please see Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2020): Martech 5000 — really 8,000, but who’s counting? for additional information on the martech landscape today.
- Manufacturing dominates all other departments in prioritizing the importance of BI this year. This finding reflects what I’m hearing from eh many manufacturers I’ve spoken with this year. The majority want to know how decisions on production runs, sourcing, supply chain, and quality impact their financial results faster than traditional reporting allows for. Add to that the uncertainty COVID-19 has created for all manufacturers, and the quickening pace of BI adoption is antidote they’re looking for to find greater stability in turbulent markets.
- The greater the uncertainty in an industry, the more likely their executive and C-suite leaders are using BI to search for greater stability. Retail/Wholesale, healthcare, financial services, and technologies are the industries whose executive and C-suite leaders are most likely to adopt BI in 2020. Each of these industries is being redefined by the pandemic and its economic fallout today. Having real-time data interpreted using advanced analytics and BI techniques is proving to be effective in reducing risks and seeing the impact of decisions on financial performance. Because of these factors, executives and the C-Suite are the primary targets for BI use 80% of the time.
- Smaller organizations are more adept at fast-tracking BI adoption n compared to their mid-size & larger enterprise counterparts. Consistent with previous Dresner research studies, their latest research findings show organizations with 100 employees or less are most adept at moving quickly on BI adoption and use. Besides being more efficient at making decisions, smaller, faster-growing businesses tend to have employees with deep knowledge expertise in key areas. The talent density of smaller, fast-growing startups with 100 employees or less is impressive, further accelerating BI adoption and use.
- BI tools are most commonly used by R&D, Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC), Marketing & Sales, and IT in 2020. BI apps and tools continue to see growing adoption across all functional areas of enterprises. Executive management and the C-suite are most likely to concentrate on a single BI tool or app. In contrast, the data-intensive nature of the work R&D teams are doing requires them to use a much broader base of apps and tools. One in three (32%) of R&D teams regularly use four or more BI tools to do their work, leading all departments in 2020. Martech’s growing influence on making marketing strategies more measurable is also reflected in Marketing & Sales’ use of 4 our more BI apps & tools.
- Financial Services leads all others in the per capita adoption of BI apps and tools in 2020. Further evidence of how enterprises are relying on BI as the antidote for uncertainty is seen in how many BI apps and tools they have adopted. Financial Services dominates all other industries, with 39% having four or more tools in use today. Retail/Wholesale respondents are most likely (85%) to use up to three but not more than three BI tools. Awareness of the number of tools in use is lowest in Consumer Services and Higher Education.
