Corporate IT departments' will become increasingly marginalised in the delivery of business intelligence (BI) as search and collaboration tools allow individuals and business units to build their own analytic applications, according to Gartner.

By 2012, IT's role in BI will begin to lessen as users turn to interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software-as-a-service and service-oriented architectures to build and consume their own reports, according to the report.

"Evidence suggests that BI is used aggressively by just 15 per cent to 20 per cent of business users," said Kurt Schlegel, research director at Gartner. "Most business users feel BI tools are hard to use.

"Other technologies, such as collaboration and internet search have been widely adopted by mainstream users in both their business and personal lives. BI has the same opportunity for massive adoption, but it must overcome its well-earned reputation of being difficult to use."

The emerging technologies will help reach the 80 per cent of users not using analytical applications today. The use of such technologies outside of CIO and IT control has the potential to "dwarf" today's problem of users creating thousands of spreadsheets to perform their own analysis, Gartner noted.

"The reality is that central IT has very little power to prevent business units (and users) from adopting these technologies," the report states.

For example, propelled by the popularity of rich internet applications, interactive visualisation technology will likely become accepted by users over the next two years as a common front-end to analytical applications, according to the report.

Interactive visualisation allows users to perform typical BI tasks such as data filtering, drill downs and pivots by clicking on a pie wedge or circling dots on a plot. Because this technology relies heavily on attractive displays rather than the grid-style analysis and reporting offered by relational databases and spreadsheets, users will find it easier and more fun to use, Gartner added.

Search integrated with BI will help users better find existing reports and information from structured sources where a report doesn't exist, the report noted. Applying a search index to structured data sources, rows and columns allows end user to perform their own ad hoc exploration of the data, according to the research.