Gartner: Smart devices may fuel BI adoption in Hong Kong

While less than 30% of the potential users of organisations’ standard business intelligence (BI) tools actually use the technology, the consumerisation of IT and the growing popularity of iPads and other smart devices might change the picture in Hong Kong, said Gartner.

“While senior business executives make the decisions on IT purchases, they often leave the use of technology to subordinates because it is too difficult or not friendly,” said Gartner’s Hong Kong-based Research Director and BI expert, Daniel Yuen. “The iPad and other smart devices represent an opportunity for these senior executives to unlock the power that BI offers, using tools designed and built for the iPad or other smart devices.”

Gartner’s research shows that BI is not pervasive and adoption is not in line with the investment made by most firms.

“Part of the problem is that people’s experience of interacting with Internet-powered technologies changes their expectations of IT,” said Yuen. “BI users want to be able to just pick up and use the technology — they don’t want to have to read the manual,” he added.

Yuen also pointed out that this places a high degree of importance on the human/computer interaction aspects of BI product and deployment design.

According to him, three key factors that can drive adoption of technology can also discourage the sustained use of BI by its intended users, if weak or absent including the ease of use, performance and relevance that is if the BI platform omits information that users need, or does not express content in line with their frame of reference, then they will stop using it or, once again, use it to move–and probably add–data into a spreadsheet for “correction.”

“A failure in any one of these areas can be the cause of poor takeup, and goes some way toward explaining why just 28% of users have adopted the organisation’s standard BI platform of choice,” according to Yuen.