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The Forrester Wave: Shadow of Business Intelligence

2014 Forrester Wave Agile Business Intelligence Solutions

2014 Forrester Wave Agile Business Intelligence SolutionsThe Forrester Wave Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2014 is a well-written report put together by Boris Evelson, which reviews and compares 16 agile BI providers. The report gives a nice introduction for people who may be new to the Agile BI market as well as provides interesting tables, graphs, and infographics that will give you a nice overview of the market. Mr. Evelson also explains their vendor selection criteria, exhibits vendor profiles, highlights leaders and contenders, and describes the methodologies for the “Forrester Wave.”

As I was reading the report, there was one topic in particular that I could truly relate to which was what Forrester refers to as the “shadow” of BI – homegrown BI applications. The reason I can relate to this is because I speak to numerous companies everyday about BI and many of them have built their own in-house or homegrown solutions that integrate with a more traditional enterprise BI platform and I’ve always wondered about this trend.

Boris Evelson explains, “Alas, enterprise grade BI platforms are often anything but agile. Indeed, all modern enterprise BI platforms are scalable and robust, support and promote a single version of the truth, and minimize operational risk. However, these capabilities carry a hefty price tag of complexity, rigidity, and inflexibility, and as a result they are slow to react to constantly changing customer and business requirements. This lack of BI agility promotes an unfortunate side effect — proliferation of shadow IT, “homegrown” BI applications.”

Forrester also presents a bar graph in (Figure 1) and offers these questions, “How would you describe the BI applications or tools that you use? Are they primarily company-issued, or are they ‘homegrown’?”

The graph resembles a standard normal distribution curve (Bell Curve) displaying both companies using 100% homegrown BI and companies using 100% company-issued BI are at each tail, and companies using a 50/50 mix are at the median and mean of the curve.

This echoes what I “felt” after speaking to different corporations about BI and it’s nice to see some data behind it. So why are we seeing this?

In figure 2, Evelson presents a graph called “Reasons Business Users Resort to Homegrown BI Apps.”

From this, the top 3 reasons why homegrown BI solutions are being used are:

  1. Company-issued BI don’t have all the data needed
  2. Company-issued BI don’t have the right data model, relationships, attributes, and hierarchies
  3. Company-issued BI are too restrictive in their data models

If you want to see the entire list from the Forrester Wave, click here.

In addition, click here for our Free 2014 Business Intelligence Solutions Buyers Guide which outlines features and capabilities of the Business Intelligence providers that Forrester lists and also a handful more, giving you a better understanding of your Business Intelligence options.

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