What are the key drivers of business intelligence and why is it becoming such a focal point for organizations looking to transform digitally?
For executives and decision-makers, the need to digitize their processes becomes more pronounced as the competitive advantages that can be accrued from implementing solutions like business intelligence.
In this blog post, we’re going to be looking at what the key drivers of business intelligence adoption are and what it means for companies today.
Growth of the Business Intelligence Market
The global market for business intelligence has grown significantly in the last few years alone and is expected to grow to a substantial degree in the next five years.
The business intelligence market in 2020 was valued at $21 billion. In 2026, this figure is expected to grow to $41 billion at a CAGR of 12%.
In 2018, the market was worth $14.3 billion, demonstrating the enormous growth potential of BI solutions.
Adoption of Business Intelligence
The adoption of BI solutions among all businesses has risen in virtually every industry.
BI adoption is greater in larger enterprise organizations—with an adoption rate of 80% among companies with more than 5,000 employees.
In small and midsized businesses, that figure is 26%, suggesting that SMBs have a long way to go in catching up to their larger counterparts.
In addition to this, just 20% of businesses considered their work environments to be data-driven last year. However, 70% of business leaders agree that analytics has changed their industries in at least a moderate way, and 54% of them say that business intelligence is either “critical” or “very important” to their current and future strategies.
In short, organizations of all sizes are adopting BI with increasing frequency, with many seeing its analytical capabilities as essential to their business goals and the more effective leveraging of data as important to future initiatives.
Key Drivers of Business Intelligence
Now, let’s look at the key drivers of business intelligence and what’s behind them.
Tech Drivers
When it comes to technology needs driving the adoption of business intelligence, there are some clear commonalities between organizations as a whole that appear to be pushing the growth of the market.
Firstly, there is a frequent desire among businesses to adopt business intelligence for its technology capabilities and what it can provide in terms of analytics capacity.
As reported in BARC's Data, BI & Analytics Trend Monitor 2021, data discovery, self-service analytics, and real-time analytics were all cited as among the top 10 ranking trends between 2017 and 2021.
What this tells us is that organizations are holding in particular regard the need to implement BI because it allows decision makers more control over leveraging data (often unused or underutilized), the ability to study analytics without any additional help, and to be able to do it all instantly in real-time.
As companies continue to recognize the importance of BI as a tool to inform their business decision-making across all lines of business, these specific use cases for BI solutions will continue to be a driver for implementation for years to come.
Data-driven organizations are 23x more likely to acquire customers, six times more likely to retain customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable than non-data driven peers.
What’s also significant is the fact that these trends have persisted over a long period of time as key drivers as reported by decision-makers and executives, suggesting their long-term significance with regard to driving BI adoption.
Related Post: What Do Business Digitization Strategies Look Like Today?
Business Drivers
Business drivers for business intelligence adoption among organizations have long been the biggest forces pushing the growth of the industry and show no sign of letting up.
In the simplest terms, rather than specific tech use cases being the primary drivers of adoption, the desire to modernize organizations in terms of how they are structured from a data and analytics standpoint is more often than not the guiding influence in driving BI strategies.