Internal politics and the tendency of IT directors to report to the chief finance officer (CFO) rather than the chief executive are hampering the adoption of business intelligence (BI) reporting systems at large organisations.

That is the view of Gerry Cohen, founder and CEO of BI specialist Information Builders, who argued that smaller firms are outperforming their larger rivals in their use of BI systems. "We sell to companies of all sizes and the smaller firms seem to have an easier job using BI effectively," he said. "The bigger firms face too much internal politics with BI deployments."

Cohen believes the desire of managers to keep control over the data within their departments is making it difficult for large firms to roll out BI systems across their whole organisation.

Cohen argued that the situation is made worse by chains of command that often see IT directors report to CFOs rather than CEOs. "I believe there is a correlation between who the CIO [chief information officer] reports to and how widely BI is used in the organisation," Cohen said. "If the CIO reports to the CEO the company is much more likely to roll out BI as the CEO will look at the bigger picture of how BI can help drive sales and lower costs. If the CIO reports to the CFO he tends to be more conservative and concerned about the security of the data so is less likely to endorse BI."

Cohen said firms' needed to be clearer about what they want to achieve with BI and attempt to embed reporting functionality deeper into existing applications and processes. "A lot of firms say they are going to do more BI but the question is for what purpose?" he asked, claiming that too many organisations deploy a BI dashboard for senior executives but fail to roll out BI functionality to operational staff who could use it to gain competitive advantage.

To tackle this problem, firms should look at means of embedding operational BI technology into their existing applications so more staff can gain access to reporting functionality without necessarily knowing that they are doing so, Cohen said.