Evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions is growing. Fact-based decision making is spreading throughout commercial, nonprofit, and public sector organizations. The economic downturn is spurring organizations to examine ways of retaining customers, spending capital and operating budgets, and complying with regulations. However, over the long term, BI solutions will continue to be applied to optimize a wide array of processes in an effort to improve performance management and organizational competitiveness.

An increasing number of organizations are making BI and analytics functionality more broadly available to all decision makers inside and outside the organization. Internally, more pervasively available BI solutions lead to greater accountability by all employees and greater consistency in performance management. In pursuit of pervasive BI, organizations should focus on the five key factors that can be directly influenced to increase diffusion of BI. They are:

Degree of training on the data, tools, and analytic techniques

Design quality of the BI solution

Prominence of data governance

Nonexecutive involvement in promoting the design and use of BI solutions

Prominence of a performance management methodology

This IDC white paper discusses the growing body of evidence suggesting a direct link between investment in business analytics solutions and organizational performance.