Expected Benefits

Participants in our survey indicated that most of the integrated search and BI applications they have deployed or will deploy in the next year involve running search or ad hoc queries against data already in their BI systems. And most (59 percent) also told us that the highest-value benefit they will derive is being able to use search as an interface for BI, which will facilitate better querying. This reflects the fact that difficulty in using BI to perform ad hoc analyses is a chronic problem for users. The use of search as a query tool has the potential to change how organizations use BI. By simplifying the complexities of currently inflexible SQL-based interfaces, search technologies have the potential to extend ad hoc queries to business users companywide.

When we asked about the business results they expect to realize by integrating search with business intelligence (see exhibit 3, below), more than half of survey respondents rated making better-informed decisions as the most important benefit. This was true regardless of the respondent's organizational role. Those who selected this option also most often selected running ad hoc queries as their most important need.

Business intelligence is a key technology for enabling performance management, and combining search with it should help companies improve performance even more. The top two benefits of search integrated with BI, as shown above, are both key aspects of performance management. Providing fast access to needed information is critical for responding quickly to events, which in turn can improve performance. In fact, the five factors that our survey respondents selected most often as benefits of integrating BI and search are directly related to business performance.

Understanding performance and determining how to optimize it require relevant information. Most organizations expect integration of BI and search to improve customer satisfaction, lower costs, and increase revenue. Eighty-three percent of organizations said that bringing unstructured data into the BI environment is important for performance management processes. We advise organizations to examine the intersection of these technologies for ways to improve their integration and dissemination of corporate knowledge. Although the number-one search-related BI capability indicated in the research is providing a single point of access to information in the enterprise, that capability promotes understanding of performance but does not directly help improve it.