As we continue to refine our Relational Search appliance, we are always looking to better understand our end users and their BI roadblocks.
This January, we surveyed 60 CIOs, VPs and Directors of IT, BI, and Analytics about their BI agility. We were interested in learning how long it took them to get reports, what their backlogs looked like, and how many resources it took to build and revise enterprise reports.
Here’s what we learned.
1. It takes way too long to build a complex report. For 81% of respondents, building a complex report takes more than a day. What’s worse, roughly half of respondents have to wait multiple weeks for complex reports to get built.
2. Producing those reports takes too much team bandwidth. The majority reported only needing one trained person to build simple reports. However, 87% of BI leaders surveyed need a small team of people to put together a complex report.
3. Custom reports remain in high demand. We asked our survey respondents how many new report and report revision requests come in each week. Most receive between 2 and 5 report requests and report revision requests each week, while 8% have to handle 20+ requests in a typical week.
4. Report request backlogs aren’t pretty. The majority reported backlogs of multiple days for a simple report and at least 3 weeks for a complex report.
5. You’re not alone if reporting worries keep you up at night. The surveyed IT leaders were not shy when it came to listing their worst reporting nightmares. Most cited headaches over resource shortages, user knowledge gaps, and the complexity of enterprise BI.
So what should you make of all this? To summarize the data: it’s clear that most BI decision-makers are unhappy with the speed, ease of use, and resource requirements of their current solution. Take a look at the survey results - how does your company stack up?
After looking at the survey, you might want to evaluate your business intelligence solution.
Here at ThoughtSpot, we’re radically reducing report creation time from weeks to seconds with our Relational Search appliance. Next year, you can expect to see a big difference in the 2016 BI survey results.
