Oracle User Group Survey: Achieving End-to-End Business Intelligence

It was interesting to read a recent article from DMReview.com “OAUG Survey Reveals Three Out of Four Enterprises Using Oracle Applications Still Use Spreadsheets for Business Intelligence Reporting”. The findings summarized were from the survey "Achieving End-to-End Business Intelligence", conducted by the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) in order to gauge the depth of BI and analytics deployments within Oracle enterprises.

3 out of 4 enterprises rely on (my emphasis) on spreadsheets for reporting and business intelligence! A corollary finding was that only one of ten employees in a corporation had access to BI capabilities (outside of Microsoft Excel, of course.)

Does this surprise anyone? If it does then you probably have not talked to many business groups in corporations today. And I do not mean just the SMB (small to medium size business) market but also the Fortune 100. And if you are surprised you probably have not read about data shadow systems.

 The survey found that 4 out of 10 respondents reported that their departments generate more than 100 reports a month taking a great deal of time to create, maintain and, of course, modify to meet changing business requirements. More than 60% said it took a day or more to generate a single report for their business users.

The survey also found that people were worried about the data quality in these reports.

Since the survey was of companies using Oracle applications, some people (maybe Oracle’s competitors?) may say that this is just a condition specific in Oracle shops. This condition is NOT unique to Oracle applications. It is pervasive throughout companies big and small, whether they have Oracle, SAP or many other business applications. Microsoft Excel is the pervasive BI tool at this point.

The biggest concern any enterprise should have is the condition of the data that is being used to make decision rather than the BI tool used. It is great to have a terrific and sexy BI tool that can slice and dice data any way a business user can image examining the business, BUT if the data is just then “garbage in, garbage out”.

And once the data is in order, preparing the data for information understandability and consumption is the next task. Just purchasing hundreds (or thousands) of licenses for a “true” business intelligence tool for your enterprise does not guarantee these products will be used or that you are providing business value. If that was true, then 3 out of 4 companies would not be relying on Microsoft Excel for reporting and business intelligence.