iPod generation fed

The "iPod generation" are fed-up with waiting for the IT department to fix business intelligence systems and are increasingly taking matters in their own hands.

"It's an unmistakable trend. Self-service is where people want to go. We're in the iPod generation and people are getting frustrated having to deal with IT and get the data they want on their screen from it - but IT will tell them it will take six months and they get very frustrated," said Mike Hepburn, EMEA director at Birst, speaking on Computing's "Better and quicker intelligence" web seminar today.

Hepburn was commenting following a poll held during the seminar in which 27 per cent of viewers responded that users regularly circumvent their IT department in order to do the business intelligence that they want to do.

"They need business intelligence tools that can grab the data, do the ETL [extraction, transformation and loading] and spin-up the data warehouse," said Hepburn. Furthermore, once completed, the interrogation of that data needs to be relatively easy - typically drag-and-drop - requiring no more than half-a-day of training to get up to speed.

However, many organisations are struggling to extract, integrate and present data to users for business intelligence purposes quickly enough, partly because that data is held in so many disparate systems - and IT often has many other things to do.

Furthermore, added Hepburn, many organisations are either too small to keep a dedicated business intelligence team in place - small companies may only be able to afford one under-employed member of staff - while bigger companies may only do business intelligence on an ad hoc, project-by-project basis. As a result, their turnover of staff may be quite high.

The Computing web seminar also asked about the biggest barriers to increased use of business intelligence, finding that cost (at 49 per cent) was the biggest, closely followed by the challenge of integrating data sources (39 per cent). A lack of skills and the difficulty of putting together a persuasive business case were also cited (37 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively).