The adoption rate of business and data analytics systems was flat this year with about half of responding companies reporting that they have adopted the technology, but investment has been strong for the fourth-straight year.
Business and data analytics solutions have moved beyond monitoring business activity to providing decision-makers with richer information to make better decisions, often in real-time, which is one of the reasons that our full study, Business and Data Analytics Adoption Trends and Customer Experience, shows investment in analytics is high.
As seen in Figure 2, the percentage of organizations budgeting funds to implement or expand their analytics solutions rose to 52% in 2017. This is up from 2016, when the investment rate was 47%, and significantly up from 2014 when the investment rank was only 27%.
“One reason analytics investment is growing,” said David Wagner, vice president for research at Irvine, Calif.-based Computer Economics, “is that analytics is getting easier to invest in. There are more vendors offering analytics solutions, BI, and even AI and machine learning than ever before. And some software vendors, especially SaaS vendors, are selling software with analytics tools ‘baked-in.’ As analytics becomes as easy to invest in as other technologies, we expect growth to continue.”
Our full study on the technology examines adoption trends for business and data analytics solutions of all types, providing data on how many organizations have the technology in place, how many are implementing it, and how many are expanding investments in new capabilities. For the most part, investment in analytics has been on a steady rise as the technology becomes more mature and easier to implement.
The study also assesses what types of solutions are being adopted, and how much money IT organizations are budgeting for their investment in these solutions. We examine return on investment (ROI) experience in terms of the percentage of organizations that report positive and break-even ROI within a two-year period. We also balance the potential ROI against the risks, measured in terms of the percentage of organizations that exceed budgets for total cost of ownership (TCO). The full study is based on our annual Technology Trends survey data.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Business and Data Analytics Adoption Trends and Customer Experience. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).