An interesting question posed recently by one customer to another at a trade show that I happened to overhear while walking (OK running) to the brownie table during one of the breaks:  "How important is the familiarity of the BI tools to you?"  Now while I didn't stick around for the answer (see "table, brownie" above), it's an issue we are hearing more and more from customers and prospects in the marketplace--"give me tools that my users will actually USE!"

You've all probably seen the Gartner CIO study that list BI as a top spending priority once again for this year--the third year running.  But what's more interesting from a "where's the opportunity to help our customers out" perspective, is the supporting data underneath.  For while there's a huge appetite for BI out there (can't get the damn brownies out of my mind, it's snack time), the delta between who's actually using BI, and who would LIKE to be using BI is still significant.  Even after 3 years--heck, even after 10 years of spending countless billions of dollars, few organizations have actually been able to deliver on the promise of "BI for everyone."  And the Gartner study bears it out.  The number of CIO's who WANT to get BI out to everyone?  Lots.  The number who HAVE gotten it out to everyone?  Few.  So why is that?

We'll get into a number of our ideas and thoughts behind this over time, but one thing we hear consistently has to do with the fact that most BI tools are just plain too hard to use by the average information worker in a company today.  They make you conform to their processes, not to yours.  They make you learn a new UI, new routine, new way of entering data.  After all, there's a reason that training makes huge money for vendors--it takes 2 weeks just to learn the system and its processes!

But increasingly, we're seeing users being brought into the decision making process for BI tools, which is great!  After all, they're the ones that have to use it.  And when asked if they'd like to learn yet another new application, tool, and process, or use something familiar to them, you can guess what they choose.

So as you consider your BI vendors and projects, keep in mind the issue of familiarity in terms of the tools you adopt.  There's something to be said for making use of the tools you already know how to use to solve your most pressing business challenges!

Now, back to brownies...