Charles Caldwell is vice president of product management at Logi Analytics, which supports software teams around the world with intuitive embedded analytics solutions for developers. He has over 20 years of experience in the analytics market, including over 10 years of direct customer implementation experience.
Organizations spend godlessly Amounts of money – millions of dollars – for business intelligence (BI) tools. However, adoption rates are still below 30%. Why is that? Because BI company failed.
Logi Analytics’ 2021 State of Analytics: Why Users Are Demanding a Better Survey found that knowledge workers spend more than five hours a day using analytics, and more than 99% find analytics very valuable when making critical decisions. Unfortunately, many are dissatisfied with their current tools due to the loss of productivity, multiple “sources of truth” and lack of integration with their current tools and systems.
There is a gap between the capabilities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and the wants and needs of users.
Throughout my career, I’ve spoken to many executives who wonder why BI continues to fail, especially when data discovery tools like Qlik and Tableau have gained momentum. The reality is that these tools are suitable for a very limited number of use cases among a limited number of users – and adoption rates reflect that reality.
Using data discovery applications, analysts can link to data sources and perform self-service analysis. The lack of self-service customization, the inability to integrate into workflows with other applications, and a general lack of flexibility affect the ability of most users (who are not data analysts) to derive meaningful information from these tools.
BI platforms and data recognition applications should provide insights into measures and inform decisions at all levels of the company. Instead, many remain costly investments that actually create inefficiencies, hinder workflows, and exclude the vast majority of employees who could benefit from these operational insights. I like to call that a lack of ROI.
Business leaders in a variety of industries – including “legacy” sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services – are demanding better results, and I think they should have gotten it long ago.
It’s time to give up BI – at least as we know it now.
Over the years, I’ve learned why traditional BI platforms and newer tools like data discovery applications fail, and what I’ve learned from companies that have moved away from them.
The inefficiency breakdown is killing your company
Traditional BI platforms and data discovery applications require users to stop their workflow in order to attempt data collection. And as you can imagine, stalling teams in the middle of their workflow results in massive inefficiencies. Instead of having the data you need to make a decision, you have to exit the application, enter another application, back up the data, and then enter the original application again.
According to the 2021 State of Analytics report, 99% of knowledge workers had to spend extra time looking for information they couldn’t easily find in their analytics solution.