Too many companies fail to link business intelligence tools to actual decision making, according to a new Gartner report. Decision support tools, like collaboration software, can help.

Despite huge investments inbusiness intelligence (BI) software and platforms that have resulted in a more informed workforce, most companies still fail to link BI to "the last mile" of business decision making, according to a recent report from Gartner Inc.

The lack of a connection between BI and the decisions it affects has also led to a lack of transparency at many organizations. That prevents BI from getting the full credit it deserves when it results in good decision making, said Kurt Schlegel, an analyst with the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm and co-author of the report.

"Despite unprecedented information availability, the past decade suffered from several imperfect decisions made in both the public and private sectors," Schlegel wrote. "It is not enough to provide voluminous access to information and expect good decisions to be made as a result."

The BI lifecycle is made up of three stages, Schlegel said. The first involves simply organizing, cleansing and collecting data, followed by the second stage of delivering that data, often in the form of reports, in a consistent way to consumers. The third and perhaps most important stage, he said, is actually applying BI to decision making.

Many organizations have matured through stages one and two but have yet to make the leap to stage three, Schlegel said. "It's a crawl, walk, run kind of thing, but I think most organizations are ready to move to stage three."

In order to make the transition, he said, organizations must develop decision support systems that allow them to use BI-related analysis and reports to experiment with more "what if" scenarios that track how a decision was made, with what data, and by whom. Schlegel called on the BI mega-vendors – SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft -- to invest more resources in developing decision support systems, though he conceded it could be some time before that actually happens, as profits for such technology are initially likely to be low. "Mega-vendors look at emerging markets and, unfortunately, they're often not important to them," he said.

With a dearth of available "out of the box" decision support products, then, collaborative and social software is, at this point, one of the easiest ways for organizations to connect BI with decision outcomes, Schlegel said. "It's a really simple idea with so many benefits."

Source: searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com