Throughout the 1990s, large enterprises spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build data warehouses, data marts, OLAP (online analytical processing) capabilities, ad hoc query and reporting, data mining, and more. Clients engaged consulting firms repeatedly for everything from building the data warehouse to populating it to maintaining it. They would do enterprise data modeling, data cleansing, data normalization, and more.

Into this century the work continued, as companies turned to consulting firms to develop Balanced Scorecards, key performance indicators, visual executive dashboards, and decision support systems. For a while people referred to these as executive information systems. Today all of the above and more, such as predictive analytics and forecasting, form part of what is now referred to as business intelligence (BI).

Despite pouring billions of dollars into BI initiatives, top executives still seem to be wandering lost in the corporate BI jungle. “I have a client who spent $150 million on an ERP system and has it working perfectly. Still, he doesn’t know what is happening in his business. He has to produce information manually,” says Scott Songnefest, U.S. practice leader for business intelligence and data warehousing at Deloitte Consulting.

That client isn’t alone. In a published report, AMR Research predicts that North American companies will spend $23.8 billion on various business intelligence technologies in 2007, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year.

“Companies have been collecting a ton of information, but not a lot of people have been able to unlock it and bring it to solve specific business problems,” says Gregory Molley, managing director, BI and performance measurement, within the Oracle practice at BearingPoint. This corporate inability to leverage previous investments in BI technology or arm top executives with the information they need to compete effectively promises to be a boon for consulting firms that can find the BI Promised Land and lead clients there.

Executives Discover BI
In recent studies, corporate executives continue to identify management information for decision-making as their number one priority. “In a study we did last year, 53 percent of the executives surveyed wanted better information for management decision-making,” reports Jeanne Harris, director of research at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business and coauthor of Competing on Analytics (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). A more recent Gartner study, she notes, confirms the Accenture finding of BI as the top executive priority.

Executives at least appear to have a good handle on their financial information — 86 percent of respondents to a recent Deloitte study report that their companies are good or excellent at reporting financial performance indicators. However, when it comes to reporting nonfinancial performance measures, 40 percent rated their company at best as average while 23 percent gave their company fair or even poor marks.

So, after nearly two decades of effort by companies to capture, report, mine, and analyze their data, both financial and nonfinancial, and the expenditure of untold billions of dollars, the majority of executives still think that they lack the information necessary to compete effectively, especially when it comes to nonfinancial performance metrics.

Another Songnefest client “spends $700 million to $800 million to produce management information that they don’t trust.” This client invested in a data warehouse and now employs 100 people in a monthly process to produce financial information. With regulations now requiring C-level executives to sign off on this information, it is no wonder that BI finally has become a top management priority.

“BI has been successful for very specific measurements at the lower levels of the company. A line manager will query a database and get answers, but executives won’t do that. They still need people to build a special tool for them,” says Eric Berridge, cofounder of the Bluewolf Group and coauthor of Iterate or Die: Agile Consulting for 21st Century Businesses, due to be published later this year. Much of the BI news recently has focused specifically on efforts to deliver BI to C-level executives.