Number of People Using Advanced Analytics

Guesstimates are often essential for market sizing and trending. To be useful, especially where primary data are lacking, they demand a valid conceptual framework.

... I'm curious how many actual and potential users there are for advanced analytics applications. Of course, that's entirely outside the scope of Boris' focus, but very much part of the "BI writ large." If traditional BI is far from pervasive in the business world, then advanced analytics - which I scope to predictive modeling, data mining, text analytics, in-database analytics, and complex event processing (CEP) - is a mere drop in the bucket.

Interestingly, the Q4 2009 Forrester survey gives us useful fodder for such an estimate. It shows that, where reporting tools are concerned, 74 percent of enterprises either already use them or are planning to implement them in 2010. For predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM), the equivalent number is 31 percent; for text analytics and CEP it's 19 percent; and for in-database analytics, 7 percent. Considering that PA/DM is the most widely adopted advanced analytics solution category, I'd estimate that perhaps 25 percent of the companies that responded use or plan soon to implement one or more of these types of solutions.

That would mean approximately one in three companies implementing traditional BI also uses advanced analytics. In other words, if, say 3 percent of employees in BI-implementing firms use traditional BI, that would correspond to 1 percent of those firms' employees using advanced analytics (for the time being, let's not concern ourselves with the overlap, within each firm, among users of traditional BI, on the one hand, and advanced analytics, on the other).

As a back-of-envelope mental calculation, it appears that Boris' numbers correspond to roughly 300 traditional-BI users per company for those that deploy the technology. From statistics gathered for my recently published Forrester Wave on PA/DM Solutions, I know that there are an average 10-20 users (i.e., statistical modeling specialists, primarily) per PA/DM-implementing enterprise. Let's take the midpoint on the latter range: 15 PA/DM users per firm. Hence, we're looking at roughly 5 percent of employees in "BI writ large" user companies that use PA/DM. If we adjust this to include the smaller numbers of text mining, CEP, and in-database analytics users, we might guesstimate 6-7 percent of employees in "BI writ large" user organizations are also doing advanced analytics.

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