Report analytics: Complementing business intelligence or replacing it?

With the explosion of available data at an organisation’s disposal, and despite the overwhelming offerings available to harness these assets, companies of all sizes continue to grapple with capturing and presenting the information they need in an engaging and understandable format. In an effort to make more informed business decisions, many departments and individual line-of-business users have turned to business intelligence (BI) solutions as a way to mine data for both reporting and forecasting purposes and to address increasing, business issues. Unfortunately, with failure rates hovering between 50% and 70% according to some studies, and business users continually looking for new tools to help them easily get at the data they need, BI alone is not always the answer.

 

 

It’s well known that BI software can provide advanced reporting and predictive analysis, but for many day-to-day reporting tasks, its sophisticated functionality is overly complex. For tasks like these, business users and self-service 'data consumers' may find the technical challenges of BI a deterrent and as a result, often rely on the IT department to generate custom reports. This not only creates more work for an already over-taxed IT group, but also introduces delays and frustration for the users who require accurate and timely information in order to perform their job effectively.

 

 

The underlying issue is that business users often have all the information they need – but that information resides in existing reports and business documents scattered throughout the organisation. Since they have no easy way to dynamically organise, integrate and analyse the intelligence trapped in these static documents, they are often left with less than ideal options. For instance, business users can rely on predefined BI reports from a data warehouse or enlist the expertise of the IT department to program custom reports.

 

 

According to a recent Computing poll of more than 250 people who use or rely on data derived from BI reporting software, BI complexity is an ongoing problem. Cost was cited as the most important factor in the BI software selection process (29%) followed closely by ease of use (25%). The fact that cost and ease of use are the most important drivers of software selection underscores the challenges that complex BI solutions present to the people who consume the intelligence for making data-based decisions. These challenges are driving the emergence of a new category of solutions within the BI market that industry analysts refer to as 'report analytics'.