Pervasive BI is Definitely Coming

A TDWI article titled “Pervasive BI: Still a Vision, Not reality” had some interesting statistics from Cindi Howson’s BI Scorecard survey.  Just looking at the top line adoption rate of just 24% of employees using BI (down from 25% in 2007), you would probably agree with the title of the article.  But towards the end of the article, there were some very positive indications of the growing movement towards pervasive BI:

• manager usage increased by 7%;
• inside staff usage increased by 14%;
• field staff usage increased by 10%.

This feels good to me, particularly given last year’s tough economic conditions.  Even though usage within business and industry analysts grew by 10%, pervasive BI is not really the domain of analysts.  It will only be a reality when everyone making daily operational decisions has access to relevant information, analytics and scenario analysis easily, quickly and within the context of their role and scope of authority.  The numbers cited above show positive usage trends for the broader audience of everyday decision makers. 

I believe that between 2010 and 2012 we will see much higher adoption rates driven by the following market dynamics:

• a greater focus within companies on continuous improvement and operational efficiencies;
• the availability of cheaper BI alternatives primarily through SaaS and cloud solutions, which makes it cost-effective to deploy BI capabilities to larger numbers of users;
• new offerings that focus on ease-of-use including the provision of “every-person” analytic capabilities that don’t require the user to be a statistician or analyst;
• availability of BI technologies that operate in right-time or near-real-time and can support rapid decision making required in today’s fast-paced business environment; 
• a recognition of the value that Operational BI and performance management deliver as a growing number of positive case studies are published.

Pervasive BI may be a vision, but it is certainly more than a pipe-dream and can be cost-effectively delivered today by a new breed of SaaS Operational BI solutions, such as myDIALS.  As an example of this upcoming reality, we have an industry-leading customer with more than 4,500 front-line people using the myDIALS Performance Management Platform to enable better business decisions and hence results.