|
There are major forces at play that are changing how business operates: Business processes are becoming more integrated and complex, economic pressures are forcing companies to do more with less, and the amount of information available is becoming more overwhelming. To meet these changing conditions, companies are progressively more dependent on increasing the productivity of knowledge workers. However, the workflows, tool sets, and skills these knowledge workers are using are more grounded in industrial-revolution-era thinking and have not been modernized to adapt to the business realities of today. As a result, many of these workers are at breaking points, spending more and more time looking through and sorting information and less time adding value to
it.
This current state creates a potentially tremendous opportunity for breakthrough productivity gains for companies that confront this rising time of information chaos. To test this hypothesis, in September 2009, SAP BusinessObjects commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the information usage requirements, patterns, and challenges of modern knowledge workers. In conducting 30 in-depth interviews with 24 business and six IT professionals across multiple industries within the US, UK, India, and Singapore, Forrester found that these companies - across industries, geographies, and roles - heavily depend on all types of information for operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making.
Regardless of the industry, the function, or the geography, Forrester found that information brokers all share similar characteristics. They use information from a variety of different sources both internally and externally, finding the right information for their specific need, which takes a lot of time. And when they do find it, they have to wade through a lot to find exactly what they are looking for, and they all feel that getting the right information to do their job is getting harder each year.
Across Forrester's interview sample, everyone wants to spend more time applying their own unique genius to the information to create value for their company. But being caught between a proverbial rock (greater workloads and more pressure to produce results) and hard place (the increased amount of time they spend looking for information), they are finding that they are seeing their work weeks extend or realizing that there are valuable activities they could be doing with the information, if they only had the time.
But often business intelligence (BI) infrastructure and applications - implemented in an attempt to aid these knowledge workers - become complex and expensive, and many Forrester clients tell us that they depend heavily on IT for most BI needs. The world, however, does not stand still, and business often cannot wait until someone from IT develops a new report - they need it now! As a result, Forrester has seen an emergence of so called "complementary" self-service BI tools that business users procure, install, and use on their own. Alas, this is also not the right answer in the long term, since such complementary BI tools make it hard to keep a single version of truth and can
create compliance nightmares and operational risks. So what is the answer? How can business stakeholders get the information on the right data at the right time and place, while using a secure, controlled, and well-managed environment, without jeopardizing information quality and minimizing operational risks? In this study, Forrester
researches and analyzes requirements and specific use cases for one type of controlled and managed self-service BI application.
|
