Companies increase their data storage capacity by about 60% every year, yet 95% of this data is never seen again, said John Schwarz, CEO of business intelligence (BI) solutions provider Business Objects.
Schwarz was speaking at Business Objects` first European user conference, held in Cannes earlier this week.
"BI is the single most important tool to unlock data and make it available to people who need to make decisions every day," he said.
The good news, according to Schwarz, is BI has grown from a decision support tool for a small group of high-level executives in a company, to a broadly-deployed solution for performance management. He maintains BI is becoming a mission-critical part of management tools businesses use to manage performance.
BI is also the number two investment priority (after security) for CIOs, according to a recent Gartner survey. Moreover, C-level executives believe BI gives them a competitive-edge.
Downside
The not-so-good news, Schwarz continued, is BI is primarily used to give companies a view of past events. It is still a highly fragmented application area driven by tactical investments - there`s no single end-to-end strategy.
"Most users also lack access to, and trust in, BI," he maintained.
Finally, a certain level of IT skill is still required to deploy most BI solutions. BI tools are still complicated, and best left to professionals, is the perception held by most.
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