Posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
According to a recent IDC survey of ITand business executives, over 55% indicated
that they are investing in business intelligence in 2005.
IDC’s Financial Impact of Business Analytics study interviewed over 40
companies in a wide variety of industries in North America and Europe. The study
found that a business intelligence implementation generates a median five-year return
on investment (ROI) of 112% with a mean payback of 1.6 years on average costs of
$4.5 million. Of the organizations included in this study, 54% had an ROI of 101% or
more. The largest class of benefit was due to “business process enhancement,” where
BI was applied to operational decisions in areas such as logistics, call centers, fraud
detection, and marketing campaign management.
The 2004 DM Review readership survey (in which
IDC participated as a contributor and editor of questions) indicated that data
warehouses in support of business intelligence that are “large will get larger.”
Fully 78% of companies whose data warehouses were larger than 500GB expect
them to grow at least 25% in the next three years, 41% of these organizations
expect the data warehouses to grow at least 50%, and 27% expect their data
warehouse to at least double over the same time period. Beyond the internal
requirement for better decision making, data volumes are also growing due to
compliance initiatives that require not only storing more data but having the ability
to retrieve it on demand.
Growth in end-user populations has also increased the demands placed on business intelligence systems. Market research from the DM Review survey showed that 34% of organizations with $500M+ in revenue have over 1,000 total users and that 33% of organizations of the same size have at least 500 concurrent users. No longer are just a few high-level executives or select analysts provided with a dedicated executive information system (EIS).
