5 Takeaways from the 2019 Wisdom of Crowds BI Market Study

by | Jun 3, 2019 | General BI

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The annual Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study by Dresner Advisory Services is out, and, as always, it is chock full of information on the status of business intelligence today.

Curious about the state of data, how successful organizations are with business intelligence, and how different vendors are rated by users? Let’s examine the top takeaways from the report.

Democratization of BI is slowly but surely growing

The Wisdom of Crowds survey contains a few questions that indicate the democratization of business intelligence. First are questions centered around which functions are driving business intelligence. Respondents indicated that Operations and Executive Management are the most influential drivers of BI, while functions losing influence are strategic planning, IT, and Business Intelligence Competency Center/Center of Excellence. This indicates that BI is becoming less centralized in organizations.

Second are questions around which users are targets for business intelligence. The survey indicates that while executives and middle management are top targets, use by individual contributors, line managers, customers, and suppliers is growing. This indicates slow but steady empowerment among downstream users.

Third are questions around penetration of BI solutions. The survey data shows that over the last several years, the percentage of employees who use BI has increased over time.

Copyright 2019 – Dresner Advisory Services

Businesses want more quantifiable benefits from BI

Year in and year out, survey respondents indicate that “better decision-making” is their top goal when they implement business intelligence. But the research shows that they increasingly want to tie BI to more quantifiable benefits.

More than 70% of organizations say “growth in revenues” and “improved operational efficiency/cost savings” are now either “critical” or “very important” when they are deploying BI. In fact, “growth in revenues” was the top mover in terms of importance, with a 2% positive shift in 2019.

Copyright 2019 – Dresner Advisory Services

Most organizations use more than one BI tool

How many BI tools are organizations using at any one time? Most use multiple tools, and don’t seem to be consolidating. The survey found that the number of organizations using only one BI tool has generally decreased over time (though with a slight rebound in 2019) and the number using four or more tools has generally increased.

“Hyped” BI activities are declining in priority

The main technology priorities for organizations are still the “tried and true” BI technologies of reporting, dashboards, data integration, advanced visualization, and end-user self service.

There’s been a lot of hype about technologies such as mobile device support, embedded BI, IT analytics, and big data. However, these have all declined in terms of priorities in 2019.

Dimensional Insight continues to maintain stellar scores

The Wisdom of Crowds report also contains a section in which vendors are evaluated by their users. Dimensional Insight has maintained very high scores in the 10 years that the report has been published.

In addition to our perfect “recommend” score, we were also an “overall leader” in the two market models included in the report, placing in the top right corner of each. The Customer Experience model plots sales and service scores on the X-axis with product/technology scores on the Y-axis. The Vendor Credibility model plots a value score on the X-axis with a confidence score on the Y-axis.

Copyright 2019 – Dresner Advisory Services

 

Copyright 2019 – Dresner Advisory Services

As always, we would like to thank our customers for continuing to support us. These high scores are reflective of the success that they have seen with their business intelligence implementations.

Kathy Sucich
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