Many companies fail to get a solid return on business intelligence investments because their IT infrastructures can't provide the fast and accurate information needed for business decision making, according to a study by enterprise software provider, Appfluent Technology.
Many companies have invested heavily in business intelligence and reporting software to provide the necessary information for daily decisions on productivity and competitiveness.
But, according to Appfluent CEO, Frank Gelbart, "Companies' production systems often can't cope because they depend on a single infrastructure to support transactional, informational and reporting functions. The result is a serious information bottleneck."
Gelbart explained, "The biggest system performance problem faced by users of reporting software is the very long time it often takes to run reports. But businesses continue to live with these problems because of the prohibitively high cost of fixing them."
Key findings
The survey was conducted online during the third quarter of 2002, and included 358 companies of various sizes across a range of industries. They survey's respondents represented a range of job functions including: executive management, IT professionals, business unit managers and consultants. The survey's key findings included:
- Almost half of respondents had experienced performance-related problems with reporting on sales, financial, support, inventory/supply chain and web applications, while only 6% of respondents never had reporting performance problems.
- Some 60% of companies credited system performance troubles to reports being generated from live production database systems.
- The IT infrastructure performance issue affects the productivity of systems and network administrators, IT support and helpdesk professionals, chief information and technology officers, and the front-line employees that solve user-related IT problems.
- Telecommunications services companies reported the most performance problems, while wholesale and distribution companies experienced the least number of problems.
The report, A Study On Reporting and Business Intelligence Application Usage has been made available as a free download at the company's web site.
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