Plans for Adoption And Deployment

The results of our research reveal that organizations are in the early stages of integrating BI and search. Just 30 percent of organizations indicated that their companies have already combined the two. Yet there is significant awareness of the potential synergy of search and BI technologies: More than half of organizations said they will deploy some type of search capability over the next two years, and one in five organizations plans to deploy combined BI-search applications for the first time within the next year.

As exhibit 1, below, indicates, many of the applications that organizations have deployed or will deploy in the next year combine BI and search to help users run ad hoc queries against their BI data; 19 percent of organizations said they already have deployed such an application, and 25 percent plan to do it within a year. After that, the two most common capabilities for which they want to combine BI and search are the ability to find reports previously run by someone else in the organization and the ability to see reports that contain particular information. Clearly, organizations want to take advantage of information that they already have close at hand but that is not easy to find, and they see integrating search with BI as a way to get to it more quickly. In each of these cases, integration of the technologies can accelerate access to specific business information and thus speed up the processes of making decisions and taking action.

In addition, companies view the integration of search and BI in strategic terms; a majority of organizations indicated they plan to deploy it first to business analysts (71 percent) and executives (57 percent). These also are the two groups most likely to already have access to the integrated technologies, followed by line-of-business owners, who were the top candidates for deployment in the next 12 months. While organizations' mainstream BI activities are focused on broader deployments to operational managers and frontline workers, only 16 percent of respondents rated extending BI to new users within their enterprise as the number-one benefit of combining BI technologies with search. It seems clear that in the early phases of this technology, it will be deployed primarily to the more elite users, just as BI was in the 1990s.

Once an organization has made the investment to provide a single application in which senior managers can search all business intelligence content, however, midlevel operations managers and frontline workers will stand to benefit from a second phase of deployment. Based on our benchmark findings, we advise organizations to think progressively and determine how to make BI more accessible by making the search interface available to all relevant knowledge workers.