COVID-19 and spending on Business Intelligence
Analytics and Business Intelligence projects have shown initial indications of defying the economic downturn that COVID-19 continues to create. Analytics and BI are being utilized by companies to plan and execute strategies that are paramount to their survival. Advisory services firm Dresner, published an interterm finding report from their 2020 COVID-19 impact survey report this week. It provides an insight into the intentions of businesses in regard to analytics and business intelligence spending. The results of which, reflect respondents’ strong belief that data-driven decision making is an absolute necessity for their businesses to survive and eventually grow again.
Dresner Advisory Services’ latest update, New Findings on How COVID-19 Impacts Businesses, Budgets, and Projects, provides a data-driven glimpse into how analytics and BI project spending is changing so far this year. It is available online to read here. Key insights from the interim results of the study include the below:
49% of businesses are either launching new analytics and BI projects or moving forward with no delay on projects that have been already put-in-place. 39% of analytics and BI projects are now on hold, and just 8% of projects have been canceled. Their research team believes that the majority of all enterprises are now adopting a data-driven approach to work their way through this crisis. This relying on analytics and BI to help find possible alternative strategies and solutions.
COVID-19’s quick, and continuous disruption is a wake-up call to every enterprise who had become too complacent or may have procrastinated about their cloud strategies. There are multiple insights from the update but cloud computing’s huge usage ascent driven by the need to have every department running on a virtual platform is the most significant. The 68% increase in enterprises saying cloud computing is now fundamental to their operations is reflective of their belief that virtual organizations will only continue to grow.
Business Intelligence budgets have continued to stabilize over the last three months, which counters the overall trend of IT budget cuts across all organizations across the globe. Before COVID-19, analytics and BI had proved their value in providing realistic and viable options for reducing costs, serving customers, and increasing revenue. 83% of enterprise leaders interviewed, believe there will be an improvement in business conditions in six months. Analytics and BI spending is benefiting from the optimistic outlook enterprise leaders have of the downturn being relatively brief.
Self-service BI’s importance grew from 25% in February to 34% in April, reflecting enterprises’ needs for providing analytics users with enhanced capacities to do their reporting and analytics. Offloading business analyst workloads back to users by providing self-service Business Intelligence applications is freeing business analyst teams and allowing them to take on more complex pricing, product mix, and supply chain modeling. This is all essential for surviving in a turbulent economy. 62% of businesses say self-service BI is essential to their businesses in 2020.
30% of enterprise leaders consider collaborative BI imperative to continuing business operations given the distributed nature of their teams today. Searching and navigating for content, and the ability to share content and commentary with other users are the two most important collaborative features in Self-Service BI systems today.