Data Types and Content

One of the top features respondents cited as a requirement of their future BI systems was better search — or, in BI terms, querying. This will be delivered when BI software that integrates search technologies becomes the new interface for ad hoc data queries. Future business intelligence systems also will include, as part of the results delivered to business users, both semistructured data (such as XML and RSS feeds) and unstructured data such as free-form text. Eighty-four percent of respondents told us it is important to integrate these categories of data (see exhibit 2, below). But they aren't being integrated yet. Although 30 percent of organizations reported that they have already integrated BI and search, only 23 percent of all survey participants have extended that technology to unstructured data such as business documents or information on the Internet. Organizations also said it was valuable to be able to run ad hoc queries or perform analysis on textual data that could be stored in documents or applications such as call center or field service systems. However, at this point, most companies are using search only to find data in reports and BI repositories. This constraint indicates the lack of maturity in deployments to date.

Integrating BI data with related business information that's in an unstructured format remains a key step toward fulfilling the promise of business intelligence. To advance, organizations will need methods of integration that can draw upon the content and document management systems they already use. We advise them to identify their major content and document assets and then determine how to integrate these assets' data with other types of information.

A majority of the organizations participating in our benchmark research emphasized that the data type they most want to integrate with BI data is customer information. We found that the integration of BI systems with customer-related content and documents is critical in many deployments, as is gaining a better understanding of customers and activities related to them. Along the same lines, the metric that the most companies will use to measure the success of their BI-search integration efforts is higher customer satisfaction (41 percent); increased revenue (34 percent) ranked number three. These findings indicate that companies want to drive performance improvements by improving their understanding of the relationship between customer purchases and product attributes.

It should come as no surprise, then, that survey respondents placed priority on customer information when asked about their business case for adopting combined BI and search technology. While 83 percent said providing a single place to search for information was the most important capability of these systems, justifying adoption on the basis of technological efficiency alone does not meet most organizations' criteria for approving purchases. But using customer information to determine how to serve them better is an analytic activity that many organizations are willing to invest in.