At the recent ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit, the company conducted an interactive survey of the attendees.

According to the survey, most attendees (63%) came from organisations of more than 1 000 people. Most respondents were middle management (30%), specialists (25%), or technical staff (15%). The industries represented by the attendees were predominantly financial services (34%) and IT (21%).

The area in an organisation that relies the most on BI is operational (58% of respondents), and the same number will be the most BI-dependent in the next few years.

However, areas with the most predicted growth are supply chain (from 5% to 12%) and contact centres (1% to 6%). A quarter of respondents said finance currently relies most on BI capabilities, but that number dropped to 13% when asked about the future. The most valuable BI capabilities to respondents are data visualisation (29%), integrated reporting capabilities (19%), end-user experience (18%) and mobile BI (12%).

The most pressing BI challenge, as chosen by almost half of the respondents (45%), is faster turnaround time. Second most dire is aligning analytic metrics with enterprise business drivers (39%).

The most important big data technology for respondents is traditional data warehouse databases (45%), and a large number of respondents are still in the process of researching or implementing BI in the organisation (27%).

Almost half of respondents (46%) say real-time BI is important to their organisation, but they have yet to enable it. Almost a quarter say their companies are in the process of enabling it, 17% have implemented it, and 13% say real-time BI is not important.