Something which is largely unused by small and medium-sized entities seems to be applied rather too intensively by many German major enterprises: business intelligence systems. Half of all major enterprises already work with such universal management information systems. However, many of them lose track of the constantly growing flood of information and analyses generated by these systems. These companies are in danger of being drowned by the flood of their own data.
Up to 10.000 analysis reports and hundreds of so-called OLAP cubes for the evaluation of company data are usual in major enterprises. This was revealed by the “Business-Intelligence-Studie 2006 biMA” study which was prepared by Steria Mummert Consulting and in the course of which 117 companies were questioned.
Quick decision making often determines whether companies lose or win. However, too many unfiltered company data make quick decision making difficult, in particular if there are always new evaluations while the old ones have to be carried on too.
Another trend: the number of people concerned by such evaluations is constantly growing in companies. Besides top management and controlling the concept of business intelligence is ever more applied by other company departments. The staff of specialist departments, however, wish easy and very targeted access to relevant data. Nevertheless, this kind of access is often not possible given that the technical infrastructure available does not ensure the necessary interconnection of users. Thus, approximately 80% of companies are still working with printouts in order to evaluate and pass on company data. 71% of companies questioned used simple analysis tools such as Excel. So far automate warning tools are used by just 12% of companies.
Currently many companies (88%) want to improve the situation by investing in automate analysis distribution systems and warning features in their business intelligence solutions (44%) for decision makers. For this reason special tools like data mining, dashboards and intranet platforms are to be applied.
Still up in the air are mobile business intelligence systems via data broadcasting over mobile phones (UMTS phones) or PDAs. So far only 17% of those companies surveyed are planning investments in this respect. 