Businesspeople want to access their company's BI data easily, then combine it with information stored in a slew of nondatabase formats. Search engines can make available all sorts of information in a way business users find intuitive.

Business intelligence (BI) has become the software of choice for companies looking to assess their performance and garner vital insights from data across the enterprise. Providing quantitative data and tools to manipulate it, BI helps organizations produce analyses that support decision-making. Large and midsize companies have invested many millions of dollars in BI software implementations as they strive to give business users information that will improve the company's results.

Originally BI was intended only for technically astute business analysts, but now many organizations are deploying these solutions to workers in sales, marketing, the contact center, the supply chain, and other areas of operations. This broad deployment means that BI technologies must meet these new users' expectations about ease of use and responsiveness.

One issue for this now-broadened universe of users is the difficulty of locating, among the many diverse reports in the BI repository, information relevant to their current tasks. An organization's data stores typically will contain not only information on financials, but also data on inventory, customer service, production details, and much more. In addition, today's BI users often find it difficult to create queries. Even when they know which table in a database contains the information they want, they may not know the column names for the specific data elements. Using SQL or a vendor-specific programming language to build a query requires technical knowledge and skill that the average business user has neither the time nor the inclination to learn.

Concurrently, the Internet has changed people's expectations about information accessibility. When search engines can deliver useful results from Web sites worldwide in a few seconds, business users question why BI applications should demand that they know which database or report holds the information they want. Accustomed to getting results rapidly through technologies from Google, Yahoo, and others, the new breed of BI users want search interfaces like those they're already familiar with to locate what they need, promptly, regardless of where in the organization the data resides. Taking note of this change in attitude, many BI vendors have announced plans to incorporate search capabilities into their products. The question now is not whether BI and search will converge, but when and how.

Ventana Research foresees two primary results of this convergence. The first is that it will become easier for business users to find information that has already been generated in BI systems somewhere in the enterprise. In most organizations, different groups have created specific business reports or dashboards to make the information that they need easy to access and apply. But the company overall may lack methods that simplify enterprisewide access to such data; utilizing search as an interface to query systems across the enterprise can be such a method. The other result of a convergence of BI and search will be the integration of data stored in a range of file types. For example, business results from a BI system, information about customer requests or shipment status in an Excel spreadsheet, and news from the Internet about the company's competitors could all be merged automatically into one regularly updated report. Combining traditional BI content with the information stored outside of databases — “unstructured” data — will provide a richer context for decision-making.

Anyone who is evaluating business intelligence or business performance management (BPM) technology for his or her organization should consider these types of emerging capabilities, which can access and merge information from a variety of source files. To determine whether this capability is yet on organizations' radar screens, Ventana Research undertook industry benchmark research designed to identify trends and best practices in the combination of business intelligence and enterprise search software to improve business efforts. We based our analysis and research on input from participants in 322 qualified organizations, most of which are located in the United States; respondents represented all major industry groups and company sizes ranging from less than $100 million to more than $10 billion in annual revenue. Slightly more than half of research participants work in lines of business, while 48 percent have IT job titles.