Data warehouse and business intelligence projects fail to meet companies' requirements

Over half of businesses gave their business intelligence and data warehouse projects a rating of "average" when asked how well they met business objectives.

In the latest study from the National Computer Centre based on a survey of 100 organisations, the majority of respondents (53%) see the overall performance as no more than average. Only 6% feel all their objectives have been met "very well" and 13% "well". At the other end of the scale, 16% see the results as "poor" and 6% as "very poor".

Despite 61% of organisations planning to extend their use of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) software, businesses are still critical of how well the technology is meeting their objectives.

Scattered information

The major difficulty mentioned in the study is that information is scattered across multiple systems making it difficult to find and access - and this has a knock-on effect that information is not always available quickly enough.

Steve Fox, director of the National Computing Centre, said: "While the research showed that there had been improvements in data quality, it is evident that organisations still need to improve their data management so that critical business information can be accessed more effectively."

The majority of companies (61%) plan to expand the scope of their current data warehousing and BI tools to new functional areas in the organisation. Ensuring existing assets are fully exploited is a priority for 58%, while 39% plan to implement new tools to enhance data analysis capabilities. Improving the performance of the system is an objective for 33%, while 33% are planning to extend the scope of the system to new users and 27% are looking to control system costs.

• The latest market data from analyst Gartner shows that spending on business intelligence has increased this year.
• CW+: Trends in business intelligence