European businesses are failing to fully realise the
value of their investments in business intelligence.
Independent research among 250 European chief information
officers, commissioned by Unisys, revealed that 60% of companies
believed their current business intelligence investments had yet to
bring about a significant improvement in customer management.
Even worse, 23% said that current systems had either made no
difference to customer management or actually made it worse.
All the businesses surveyed had invested in some kind of
business intelligence to help them better understand and manage the
performance of their business, and 63% identified cross-selling as
a critical area for business improvement. But 27% of respondents
admitted they could not use existing business intelligence systems
to cross-sell.
The survey revealed that one of the key barriers to
cross-selling and other intelligence-led data analysis, such as
fraud detection, was the high level of manual data processing and
analysis that still continued in companies.
Nearly a third (32%) of the businesses surveyed admitted that
manual processing and analysis was still required to make sense of
customer data.
Steve Rawsthorn, Unisys vice-president of sales and marketing,
said, “Many companies think they have a business intelligence
strategy once they purchase a business intelligence application.
Businesses need to wake up to the fact that effective business
intelligence isn't just about the software. Poor system performance
and design creating high levels of manual analysis is one of the
fastest ways to kill business user interest.”
Instead, said Rawsthorn, companies needed to move closer to
“becoming 3D-visible enterprises, which allows them to link, see
and analyse processes and data across their business”.
He said firms had to ensure there was an infrastructure in place
that could monitor a mass of data streams in real-time to enable
huge databases or information to be shared across departments, and
providing sufficient storage capacity for it to be done quickly and
effectively.
Analyst Gartner forecasts that rolling out business intelligence
applications will be one of the top two technology priorities for
CIOs in 2005.
The research involved telephone interviews with 250 CIOs and
CMOs or their deputies in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain,
Portugal and Netherlands. All interviewees were from organisations
employing more than 500 people. The survey was carried out in the
last quarter of 2004.