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Are people actually using their BI software, or is it becoming "shelfware"?
A lot of times when a trending product rolls by, a lot of companies will rush out and implement the system. Due to a variety of reasons, the system won't get used and becomes shelfware. Do you think that is happening in the BI space, or are people actually using their BI systems?
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1 Answer
brief answer: yes.
longer answer: yes, but.
even longer answer: in large enterprises, BI software is typically used by "data miners" who generate periodic reports expected by corporate, or try to detect patterns in operational data for more effective marketing. For the last 20 years, BI vendors have been trying to expand their usage beyond the data miner. In the last five years or so, they have achieved a partial success: increasingly, corporate finance and marketing types use OLAP (a variant of BI for more complex querying) to figure out what those reports are telling them (e.g., what's really going on in Phoenix that explains the sudden US sales dip). Part of this is because BI vendors have finally figured out that putting query results in Excel is a lot more user-friendly.
Let's put it this way: if BI was shelfware, there wouldn't be such pressure from corporate to get data into the data warehouse faster and faster after it arrives in operational systems. It used to be that a week was enough; now an hour may be too long.
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