Analyst and consulting firm, Business Application Research Centre (BARC), has come out with the top BI trends based on a survey carried out on 2800 BI professionals. Compared to last year, there were no significant changes in the ranking of the importance of BI trends, indicating that no major market shifts or disruptions are expected to impact this sector.
With the growing advancement and disruptions in IT, the eight meta trends that influence and affect the strategies, investments and operations of enterprises, worldwide, are Digitalization, Consumerization, Agility, Security, Analytics, Cloud, Mobile and Artificial Intelligence. All these meta trends are major drivers for the growing demand for data management, business intelligence and analytics (BI). Their growth would also specify the trend for this industry.The top three trends out of 21 trends for 2017 were:
- Data discovery and visualization,
- Self-service BI and
- Data quality and master data management
- Data labs and data science, cloud BI and data as a product were the least important trends for 2017.
Data discovery and visualization, along with predictive analytics, are some of the most desired BI functions that users want in a self-service mode. But the report suggested that organizations should also have an underlying tool and data governance framework to ensure control over data.
In 2016, BI was majorly used in the finance department followed by management and sales and there was a very slight variation in their usage rates in that last 3 years. But, there was a surge in BI usage in production and operations departments which grew from 20% in 2008 to 53% in 2016.
"While BI has always been strong in sales and finance, production and operations departments have traditionally been more cautious about adopting it,” says Carsten Bange, CEO of BARC. “But with the general trend for using data to support decision-making, this has all changed. Technology for areas such as event processing and real-time data integration and visualization has become more widely available in recent years. Also, the wave of big data from the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet has increased awareness and demand for analytics, and will likely continue to drive further BI usage in production and operations."
Customer analysis was the #1 investment area for new BI projects with 40% respondents investing their BI budgets on customer behavior analysis and 32% on developing a unified view of customers.
- “With areas such as accounting and finance more or less under control, companies are moving to other areas of the enterprise, in particular to gain a better understanding of customer, market and competitive dynamics,” said Carsten Bange.
- Many BI trends in the past, have become critical BI components in the present.
- Many organizations were also considering trends like collaboration and sensor data analysis as critical BI components. About 20% respondents were already using BI trends like collaboration and spatial/location analysis.
- About 12% were using cloud BI and more were planning to employ it in the future. IBM's Watson and Salesforce's Einstein are gearing to meet this growth.
- Only 10% of the respondents used social media analysis.
- Sensor data analysis is also growing driven by the huge volumes of data generated by the millions of IoT devices being used by telecom, utilities and transportation industries. According to the survey, in 2017, the transport and telecoms industries would lead the leveraging of sensor data.
The biggest new investments in BI are planned in the manufacturing and utilities industries in 2017.
Source: readitquick.com, November 14, 2016