Business Intelligence Maturity

[Former Member]

Hi

When investigating BI implementations and use it is important to consider the context. This could invole: what component of BI is being implemented, what is the BI history of the company, whether it is an upgrade or new implementation, if it is an upgrade is it technical or functional?

Another important facet of BI implementation or use is the BI maturity. There have been a number of BI maturity models which have been developed. We have conducted research using the American SAP User Group BI maturity model to map BI usage in Australia. The output of the research was a research paper and an industry repor which has been distributed to Australian companiest. The research paper is currently under review so I have included a link to the industry report.

http://www.businessandlaw.vu.edu.au/staff/paulhawking/Business%20Intelligence%20Maturity%20Report.pd...

Good Luck

Paul Hawking

SAP Academic Program Director

Victoria University

Australia

[Former Member]

Hi Roland

I believe that the nature of BI originally allowed for ad hoc approaches to reporting especially with the availability of Business Content. Traditionally, SAP in their customer presentations would provided a few positioning slides which would talk about research/strategy/best practice and then the remainder of the presentation would then discuss product. I have seen little evidence of this in the BI presentations. SAP started to do introduce strategy with the introduction of Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) but then they purchased Business Objects (BOBJ). The presentations stopped mentioning EDW and focussed on BOBJ tools. Now we are seeing presentations about which tools for which situations.

I rarely see any presentations about BI Competency Centers. I was hoping that while there was confusion amongst customers in regards to the future and BOBJ that more attention would be paid to BI strategy. Some companies have very mature BI practices but this is not the norm.

Gartner recently surveyed C level executives about their priorities and BI has dropped from 1 to 5. On explainantion that was given was that the tools are available but BI has not lived up to expectations. This is a reflection of the lack of BI/repoting strategy in companies.

There are other BI maturity models which include other factors than the ASUG model.

Regards

Paul Hawking

SAP Academic Program Director

Victoria University

Australia

[Former Member]

Hi Paul!

Very good report and interesting findings, e.g., that 77% of companies surveyed were still in the early stages of BI maturity. Considering that you have asked companies that are members of the SAUG and at the same time are interested in BI, I wonder what that percentage might be for non-SAP companies in general, especially small and medium-sized enterprises... I also wonder why so few companies are in a mature phase and whether establishing a BI competency center is the only parameter or whether there are other factors that have helped them getting there.

Cheers,

Roland Schwald

Albstadt-Sigmaringen University, Germany