SharePoint And BI Survey Q&A: The Last Mile To Business Intelligence Users

By nature, business intelligence (BI) transforms raw, meaningless data into meaningful, tangible, and actionable information. But successful BI requires multiple components and steps that must be executed in perfect choreography. While the data sourcing, integration, cleansing, and modeling constitute the bulk of the BI effort, no BI project can succeed unless the last mile to the BI user — a portal — is set up, configured, tuned, governed, and managed properly. To gauge the current maturity of the adoption of SharePoint as both a BI tool and portal, Forrester polled 57 BI and portal practitioners in March 2009. Survey results highlight the ongoing conflict between strong adoption momentum and multiple challenges with integration and governance.