More than 60% of business intelligence implementations trigger ‘a barrage of complaints from business users’, according to research by BI firm Kognitio.

A common complaint was slow delivery of a return on investment, with 78% of the 200 survey respondents claiming that their company’s BI projects had taken more than a year to produce meaningful results.

This was despite 25% of implementations costing over £1 million and 50% at least £500,000 – making it small wonder that 65% of companies consider the technology to be too expensive.

“This is due to the manpower and time required from the IT department, the cost of hardware acquisition and deployment and the cost of software licences and deployment, as well as the cost of outside consultancy firms,” said Kognitio’s CEO, Roger Llewellyn.

“Gaining intelligence a year after starting a BI implementation is completely unacceptable – it is no wonder BI implementations so often fail and that they have such a bad reputation.”