What are some things that need to change in the BI industry in order to see a higher adoption rate?

Becky asks for "some things that need to change", and of course the list can be as long as you feel like typing... But let me focus on one key change that I feel leads to all others ... a total commitment to business relevance.

There is much emphasis on changes in the tools market, and it is, indeed, changing rapidly with acquisitions, huge leaps in performance, NoSQL, to name but a few. And vendors will happily tell you why their gadget is better than the next guy's, and why their particular approach or tool will make the difference to user adoption rates... But, the truth is that business people are seldom turned on by technology (except in some specific industries or cases). What they want to see is results.

And this is what's meant by business relevance. Every one of the factors listed above by Jonathan can indeed drive adoption - but only if it is relevant to the solution of a real business problem or drives a real business opportunity. IT departments within businesses and the consultants they employ thus have an interesting challenge. They must become invisible, along with their infrastructure that delivers information. And then they must sell the value of the information and infrastructure they have built invisibly by showing how users can reap the benefit. Forget the technology; focus on the real business value.

Why is that after the successful deployment of state of the art ERP and Business Intelligence software folks in strategic areas of the company still struggle to make sense of the data?

The reason is pretty simple. Strategic Marketing is the headlights of the business; their job is to predict the future and exploit that prediction in a manner that increases market share, revenue and profitability. Their focus is mostly outside and in the future while ERP data is all about inside and in the past.

When companies populate their BI systems solely with internal data from the ERP, this only supports the back-office or day-to-day operation but it does not help folks in strategic functions. Marketing, sales or line of business management need a much wider perspective to impact the bottom line.

Marketing needs a 360 degree view of the market-business-profit reality. This includes both internal and external sources of data usually not found in the transaction system. They need to access external market intelligence to compare it with company performance metrics. This can be market and customer segmentation, updated customer and competitor merger and acquisition status, competitive opportunities, business and products under threat, market size, forecasts, etc.

In my experience, using Business Intelligence software to integrate internal and external data has always a positive change in the company’s culture, where instant access to strategic knowledge helps folks in charge of strategy to accurately answer complex business questions within minutes.

Marketing becomes an avid Business Intelligence user when the configuration of both data and BI software provides the key measures and dimensions, in a user-intuitive way, to monitor business direction against the company’s strategy. They can quickly find the root cause of problems and opportunities, with no intervention of IT or business analysts, and take immediate action faster than their competition.

A well organized strategic BI implementation transforms Marketing from Art to Science while unfolding an analytical competitive advantage that translates in bottom line impact.

I wrote a 3 part blog series on this concept a few weeks ago that goes into depth on 3 essential qualities of self-service BI that would increase adoption, those points were:

Users have to have an interface they find comfortable - http://www.yurbi.com/blog/bi-thoughts/3-essentials-of-your-self-service-busin...

The BI solution must be able to meet the need for the full range of BI users - http://www.yurbi.com/blog/bi-thoughts/self-service-bi-is-not-one-size-fits-all

And the IT and Security group must feel comfortable with the security model of the solution to give end users the access and power they need - http://www.yurbi.com/blog/bi-thoughts/essential-self-service-bi-quality-3-sec...

Users will adopt the solution that provides them with relevant, real-time, actionable results that they control.

Today's model tends to be a centralized model of BI departments that have a high workload (ie long delays to respond to user needs) and distance from the business unit (ie users don't get what they need) and long change cycles (reports and data become stale). So until users have the self-service BI that gives them the 3 main points above, adoption will be low and the cost to the business will be large with little to negative ROI.

There are political and tehnical things that have to change in order to see a higher adoption rate. Apart what is already said, I can add
1. Political : If BI implementation is not adequatelly supported from the top of the company (management), then most people will stick to old reports (Excel) and old ways of doing things.
2. Technical: Every BI team should have Business Expert and Technical Expert. But what is more often forgotten, they need Visual Expert. Too often reports and dashboards are just poor designed, customers can like them at first, but soon they will discover that they can't read information from 3d charts, their pie charts are translucent and unreadable, their gauges are unclear, their meaning questionable and so on.