Who Buys Business Intelligence?
January 22, 2010
In December 2009, I printed out the write up “Business Intelligence (BI) Procurement Survey Results”. I am not into business intelligence, but I am interested in information about the procurement of enterprise software and systems. I read this document on the flight to Detroit earlier this week, and I noted several factoids or semi factoids that struck me as important.
The article appeared in a blog produced by MAIA Intelligence:
a company committed to developing and continually improving powerful Business Intelligence reporting and analysis products to meet the needs of corporate implementations, application service providers and value-added resellers. We serve each of our clients with integrity. No single client is more important than our professional reputation.
I profiled MAIA Intelligence for a client a couple of years ago, and it is clear that the firm has invested some money in its Web site and its information outreach activities. Like most surveys, there is not much data about the size of the sample, the methodology for selecting the sample, margin of error, and the other stuff that annoys first year statistics students.
Nevertheless, here are the items that I circled on my hard copy:
- Marketing, finance, and senior executives are the folks who are the top dogs when it comes to business intelligence. Information technology folks don’t care too much.
- The person who says “yes” or “no” to a business intelligence purchase is usually a C level executive. This horrible convention for referring to top management means that a person who is in charge makes the decision.
- The typical business intelligence purchase takes less than six months. In short, the cost of the sale is going to be high from follow ups, handholding, and the negotiation process
- Those in this sample reported that an in house installation was the preferred approach.
You can review the survey results and pluck your own gems from the write up. I am wondering how long it will take for business intelligence companies to shift their clients to a hosted or cloud based solution. The bottleneck for business intelligence is getting custom queries into the system. With search vendors starting to offer business intelligence solutions, will this trend have a material impact on the business intelligence world. IBM owns a number of business intelligence properties, and there are bunch of small and mid sized firms in the space. The Google has some interesting capabilities in this area as well.
My conclusion is that I am not sure that I know what “business intelligence” means. It is like “enterprise search”: confusing, fragmented, and capable of supporting conflicting claims that a potential buyer has a tough time interpreting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Okay, another free post. I will report this sad fact to one of the agencies responsible for intelligence. They have a need to know.
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