Firms are not getting value from their business intelligence investments due to poor governance, according to the Gartner Group.

A recent seminar held by Gartner research VP Andreas Bitterer highlighted what he called the 'great discrepancy' between money spent on business intelligence and the return on investment for companies. The current economic climate means this situation needs to be addressed more than ever, but before the divide can be crossed, firms should ensure they have a clear grasp of what business intelligence means.

“Business Intelligence is the use of information that enables organisations to best decide, measure, manage, and optimise performance, to achieve efficiency of financial benefit", offered Bitterer.

Unsurprisingly he dismissed the most popular BI software tool used by companies, Microsoft Excel, as not being a BI tool. The development and deployment of a BI strategy has been top of the list for many respondents to the Gartner annual survey for the past four years, even as the global economy continues to churn in the midst of the current climate. Somewhat inevitably given the broad definition of business intelligence, the survey doesn’t ascertain what the respondents mean by ‘BI’. However, Bitterer argues many organisations are even unclear about the value their BI provides anyway – and strongly recommends that a business case needs to be developed to bridge the great discrepancy of BI costs and its ROI.

Improving the relationship between business roles within a company is one area where greater returns in BI can be fostered. “It should be those guys in business roles who sell the ideas...The idea of BI is to enable the business”.

Bitterer concludes, “There needs to be a lot of communication and collaboration between the guys who are actually building it and the business guys so that the benefits of BI are nearly always on the business side, whatever that function is.”

“If you can identify what the business value of that investment would be within your BI governance programme, then somebody will need to start [prioritising]...Ideally you want to have a discussion where you can say ‘this has a high impact for the company’ and ‘this has a low impact for the company’.”

“What I don’t see is a BI Competency Centre (BICC), which is a group responsible for running your BI programme... most organisations don’t have any standards in terms of what is the approved set of technologies in a BI environment.”