Business Intelligence in 2012 and beyond (Trends)

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 28 of December , 2011 at 11:54 am

 

I see the following megatrends impacting Business Intelligence in 2012:

1.            Saving cost on BI and with the use of BI (Total-Cost-of-Ownership)

2.            Faster access to relevant information for everyone (Time-To-Information)

3.            Getting more value from the information available (Return-On-Intelligence)

 This impacts the BI market with the following (more detailed) trends arising:

1.                  Fixing the basics

a.       Building the foundation of any BI & DWH environment to fund future use should involve key elements like Master Data Management (Customer, Product) and  Data Quality improvements.

2.                  Big data

a.       The rise in volume (amount of data), velocity (speed of data ) and variety (range of data) gives way to new architectures involving datawarehouse appliance based on in memory technology and smart software solutions.

3.                  Mobile BI (Smartphone, tablets)

a.       Customers are demanding that access to data is Apple simple and Google fast. This puts a demand on both the backend of any BI solution (like datawarehouse appliances) but also on the frontend where information access and visualization must be possible anytime, anywhere. The increased use of tables and Smartphone’s has already become mainstream in many business environment.

4.                  Cloud / SAAS

a.       Cloud or SAAS (Software as a Service) is in increasing demand for both temporary as well as permanent usage. It’s all about services (like reporting) provided from a managed environments based on a (new) business model (often pay per use). In other words: making BI (hardware, software, data) available via the internet.

5.                  Agile development & use

a.       Historically BI has been IT controlled data collection, integration and distribution of historical data. However BI has evolved into being part of the ongoing daily (operational, tactic and strategic) business processes to plan, monitor and improve on the organizational goals.

b.      Next generation BI therefore is by nature more agile in its development (BI lifecycle)

c.       Next generation BI also requires (real- or right time) insights into (increasingly) complex questions

6.                  Self service

a.       BI once was the field of a limited number of expert users but has come a long way since. Trough the democratization of information, placing BI in the hand of many but still as a separate process, BI now has become a part of our daily work. With this comes the increased need to create insight on the fly instead of trough standard IT governance processes.

7.                  Social BI (mixing facts of BI with opinions from Social Media)

    a.       Social media like Twitter and Facebook are no longer a hype or a trend but part of everyday life both from a personal as   well as from business perspective. They can supply organizations with essential information about their customers opinions. Combined with the actual customer behavior as captured in transactional systems this proves to be a wealth of information.

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting

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