Q: For which of these purposes do you use BI/data analysis software?
Over half or the respondents of this year's IT Trends survey say they use data analytics for financial analysis. Author Dennis Adams believes that's because "it can provide increased value because it goes beyond the traditional areas of financial ratio analysis and simple financial statement analysis. Business risk analysis can be easily paired with financial analysis when thinking about data analytics. The ability to run multiple scenarios depicting changes in customer behavior, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, or unrest or government regulation is valuable and is a capability often associated with business risk analytics. Just over 30% of our respondents report that they use data analytics this way."
But, says Adams, "almost a third of our respondents aren't using analytics at all. Of that number, over 70% are small businesses. This highlights one of the chief challenges of data analytics; namely, the cost of the tools as well as collecting and storing the data itself and having staff members perform the analysis. While there are more and more open source analytic tools becoming available all the time, there are still significant costs to getting the data in a form that provides meaningful insight."
* Excerpted from "Analytics and Outlaws," (
) Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 14 No. 2