Why Data Democratization Pays Off

To some extent, virtually all business decision makers rely on business intelligence (BI) analytics and reporting. And, according to an online survey conducted by Forrester Research in 2014, more that 40 percent of organizations using BI achieve double-digit ROI on their investments within two years. [1] Not only that, but top performing companies tend to spend a greater percentage of their IT budgets on BI. [2] So it’s all good in the world of BI, right? Not exactly.

Current BI Processes Leave a Lot of Insight on the Table

Business analysts and line-of-business (LOB) data users have plenty of robust, self-service BI tools at their disposal. What they often lack is a way to get all the most relevant data into those tools. As it stands in most enterprises, the responsibility for discovering, profiling, and provisioning data for users falls on IT. And that means the process can take a long time.

In fact, in a recent joint webinar with Forrester Research on data democratization, Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Boris Evelson explained 80 percent of the effort in a BI initiative is spent only on profiling and integrating data sources, before any actual analysis takes place. And when webinar attendees were asked to respond to the question, “In general, when business users request data for analytics, how much time does IT need to deliver it?” more than 60 percent chose ‘Months’ or ‘A year or more.’

Self-Service Data Discovery, Integration, and Preparation

To help their companies compete on analytics, data managers need to move self-service, automated BI technologies down the BI stack so that business users can discover, integrate, and prepare data on their own. That’s true data democratization and it can pay big dividends. To learn more about how more effective data integration leads to greater BI agility, you can view our recorded webinar.