Take

In our benchmark research on the relation between business intelligence (BI) and search capabilities, Ventana Research assessed overall trends and the maturity of 322 organizations. Research participants from the companies we placed at the most mature Innovative level with respect to their use of technology expressed interest in the ability of combined BI and search to deliver sophisticated text analyses that link unstructured data to traditional BI data. Yet they also expressed concern whether integrated BI and search technology can carry out such tasks. This concern is underscored by our findings that the important search components participants most wanted integrated (aside from indexing) are content management (66 percent) and document management (64 percent). Along similar lines, participants’ number-one concern in the area of using search to find information in previously run BI reports was the integration of search and text analysis technology.

At the low end of the scale, companies at the Tactical level of Technology maturity are focused on the basic abilities of an integrated search and BI environment, such as having a single place to search all content and dealing with words that can have multiple meanings. Even though this is less ambitious technically, they, too, are concerned about how well BI vendors’ products can accomplish those tasks, as well as how they should evaluate them.

Across the board, then, our research finds integration to be the key business and technology challenge; it must be addressed to ensure success in BI and search deployments. Ventana Research believes that recent advances in BI and search can address these and other technology maturity questions. Overall, we advise organizations to start simply, using search to quickly access reports and queries that are stored in BI systems.

About the Author

Mark is responsible for the overall direction of Ventana Research, and drives the global performance management research agenda, which covers both business and technology areas. He researches the specific areas of Workforce Performance Management and Business Process Management. He is also the Director of the Intelligent Business Performance Management Conference and the community editor of IntelligentBPM.com, the industry's first independent forum for information, news, and discussion about business performance management. An industry veteran with more than 17 years of industry experience in business and technology, before founding Ventana Research, Mark worked at companies including SAP, META Group, Oracle and IRI Software. Mark can be contacted at mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com.