Business intelligence software which includes databases, data transformation tools and software for searching and presenting interactive reports, as dashboards have been around for 25 years. In the last ten years, these tools have become easier to use and more able to deal with very large data sets.  

Cloud-based software has reduced the initial cost of implementing business analytics and minimized the workload for maintaining and performance-tuning these environments.  

According to Dresner Advisory Services, “Wisdom of the Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study 2024,” business intelligence software penetration peaked at just 41% adoption in 2022. It declined in the subsequent years to 38% in 2024. Why? The same study provides another clue. The primary audience for business analytics is Executive Management. This makes sense when justifying the investment in the first six months of a deployment. The executives who approved the funding need to see results.  

Over the past fifteen years, I have accumulated many stories of unexpected business analytics insights that have provided considerable savings. However, moonshots don’t win the long game. 

What seems to get less funding is spreading the understanding and use of business analytics wide and deep within the organization. Achieving 41% penetration does not look like success to me. What about the other 59% of people who aren’t utilizing the technology?  

Getting 100% usage may be unnecessary and too costly, but 90% penetration seems like an attainable goal that should be funded through training and knowledge-sharing of best practices and lessons learned.  

Measuring competency and usage with objective metrics company-wide should be part of your governance plan to infuse the entire organization with improved knowledge and skills that drive process improvement. 

Change Management 

As Steven Covey said, “Begin with an end in mind.” The excellent new tools the business intelligence software industry provides should be spread to every part of the organization. Training everyone to use the software is crucial. It’s not enough to provide one training session; it must be ongoing and continuous, with a mix of formal classroom, web self-directed, reading resources, user groups and regular meetings to share learnings and successes. 

But training isn’t enough. The focus of business intelligence systems must decentralized and move from the technical staff in IT/BI teams throughout the company into sales, marketing, operations, Human Resources, finance and accounting.  

Roles of Technical and Operating Teams 

The role of your BI/IT team should be as technical experts, unbiased reporting, technical support and measuring metadata improvement. For business intelligence to contribute to meaningful and consistent business process improvement, it must be decentralized. Everyone must develop the knowledge and skill to fully utilize the available data and turn it into actionable information. This means your non-technical operating management and staff must learn to access and use the information more effectively. 

Consultants 

We provide training plans and training for our clients. Many BI consulting companies do this. Some focus on beginners, while others may provide more nuanced training specific to a client’s needs. Experience in the software you use on real-world deployments is crucial for developing best practices. You should engage consultants to help your team, at least initially, to jumpstart your training regime. 

Formal Training Courses 

Many resources exist for classroom and online training. You can search for these online for any part of the business intelligence software stack. Some are product-specific, and other resources are more generic and process-focused. Formal training is crucial for building knowledge, confidence and adoption early in your business intelligence journey. 

User Groups 

Creating an internal user group that meets regularly is beneficial for two reasons. First, it allows employees to use the tools effectively to share their best practices. This is a very effective way to spread good ideas and best practices for your tools and environment. The sweet spot for meeting frequency in many companies is quarterly. Presenters should feature success stories within your organization, but consulting partners and other companies may also contribute helpful learning. Best practices for visualizing data, tool use cases and providing financial payoffs in story form help people think of ways they can adapt to success within their team. 

Ongoing Training for Each User Persona 

Training to be geared toward every level of user: 

1. Executives 
2. Line Managers 
3. Middle Managers 
4. Staff 
5. Analysts 
6. Technical Staff 

Incentive Plans 

This is an opportunity because I don’t see many companies doing it. To change behavior and develop a more information-informed culture of decision-making, it makes sense to change incentive plans to reward the behavior and results that you want to achieve. 

Consider altering a part of every employee’s incentive structure to include attainment of measurable knowledge in business intelligence, data analytics, data architecture and actual business process improvement. This can mean skill acquisition and testing, documented process improvement and objectively reported metadata improvements. 

A portion of each operational manager’s incentive pay should be based on measurable improvements in their workflow’s first-pass data accuracy, timeliness and completeness. These metrics can be developed as part of the data transformation process that your BI/IT team already provides by creating outputs of the first-pass data quality for the transaction systems used to build your data warehouse.  

Once these processes are started, you will have objective benchmarks for your current state. Set reasonable goals for improvement and reward people for achieving them. 

I’m not suggesting significant changes. Start with 10% of their incentive pay based on measurable improvement in first-pass data quality. Consider how you can create additional incentives for more qualitative improvements in their team’s skill level and tool usage, as well as example success stories that can be documented as part of the business intelligence reporting and validated by your accounting team. 

This sends a consistent message that executive leadership feels it is essential. 

The Goal 

Dresner’s study finding that current adoption has declined to 38% isn’t inspiring. It indicates a training and culture challenge. A more rewarding penetration goal is 90% adoption. If it were easy, everyone would be hitting that mark. I believe this is achievable with targeted training, simple KPIs and a clear mandate from executive leadership. 

Develop penetration and usage goals for every user persona and team within your company. Create incentives for operating managers to care about learning the basics of data architecture and using the software tools you have invested in more effectively to improve the process workflows they manage. Task your BI Technical resources to develop objective performance report cards communicated weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual cadence.  

Treat data as an asset worth cultivating. Cultivating data means turning it into reliable, timely, actionable information. Make developing the skills to understand data structure and using the tools you are investing in a high visibility requirement with expectations that executives monitor. 

In the next post, I’ll discuss system health and metadata, what you need to do and how you can achieve it.