Analytics and BI are the highest technology priorities this year, and a more diverse and greater number of business users are now clamoring for BI tools. The tools are becoming more fully integrated into entire organizations. The business users want ease of use, speed, and flexibility, while IT personnel want functionality and the ability maintain control on quality and standards.
Many business users are drawn to the data discovery tools from smaller vendors, while IT still sees the advantages of sticking with “leaders” quadrant single vendors, like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP. The ability of smaller vendors to innovate more quickly is responsible for this dilemma. Partnering by the larger vendors with smaller ones has helped to mitigate the problem. Examples of this collaboration include MicroStrategy with Visual Insight, IBM with Cognos Insight and Microsoft with Power View. The BI world has had to grow more open to a wider portfolio of tools from multiple vendors.
Demand for mobile BI, such as smartphones and tablets has grown to the extent this year that it has now become a part of the Gartner analysis. For some, it has become their primary model for BI interaction. Again, this can lead to additional independent silos of data. BI and analytics are also moving more beyond their traditional realms of sales, finance, and operations analysis, and into risk management, quality management and social media.
A further trend is away from BI platforms as simply systems of performance measurement, and more recognition of its analytic capabilities as an actual part of the business decision-making process.
Directly connecting to Real-time data in operational applications, and analyzing and acting upon that data is becoming more important. There is also a growing recognition by both business and IT that they must gain an understanding of all of the potentially relevant information sources, whether they are technically Big Data, in the Hadoop/NoSQL sense, or not.
As BI matures, there are a greater number of BI-based applications of a more generic nature, as well as the customized applications for specialty vendors available for purchase, as opposed to doing all of the work in-house.
An important hurdle that still exists for BI is the excessive complexity involved in implementation, maintenance, development and use. While the data discovery phase has been made somewhat easier for users, much remains to done in simplifying the analytics process. Another solution is using cloud based services to move the workload to others.
These are just some of the trends that we will be watching this year, as BI and Analytics move into the next phase of maturity.
