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.

• 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.

• “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.

Drawing value from data with BI: Data Discovery

'We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge' according to best selling author, John Naisbitt. Today’s businesses have the ability to collect an extraordinary amount of information on everything from customer buying patterns and feedback to supply chain management and marketing efforts. Are you drawing value from your data?

It is nearly impossible to draw value from the massive amount of data your business collects without a data discovery system in place. So, what is data discovery?

Data discovery

Data discovery is a term related to business intelligence technology. It is the process of collecting data from your various databases and silos, and consolidating it into a single source that can be easily and instantly evaluated. Once your raw data is converted, you can follow your train of thought by drilling down into the data with just few clicks. Once a trend is identified, the software empowers you to unearth the contributing factors.

For instance, BI enables you to explore the data by region, different employees, product type, and more. In a matter of seconds, you have access to actionable insights to make rapid, fact-based decisions in response to your discoveries. Without BI, discovering a trend is usually a case of  coincidence.

With data discovery, the user searches for specific items or patterns in a data set. Visual tools make the process fun, easy-to-use, swift, and intuitive. Visualization of data now goes beyond traditional static reports. BI visualizations have expanded to include geographical maps, pivot-tables, heat maps, and more, giving you the ability to create high-fidelity presentations of your discoveries.

Discover trends you did not know where there

With data discovery, executives are often shocked to discover trends they didn’t know were there. Michael Smith of the Johnston Corporation had this to say after implementing BI:

'Five minutes into the demo, I had found items that didn't have the margin I was expecting, customers that didn't have the profitability I was expecting and vendors that weren't performing the way I expected. I realised that we were onto something that would be very impactful to our business'.

These discoveries allow companies to discover unfavourable trends before they become a problem and take action to avoid losses.

Take action now

Many of the most successful companies today are using BI to inform their strategies and day-to-day operations. With relevant insights, a company can now make the most knowledgeable decisions about effective (digital) strategies to acquire, serve, and retain valuable customers. Having a mountain of data is useless unless it is converted into meaningful information. The ability to discover the truth behind your data will go a long way to guarantee your company achieves and maintains its competitive edge.

Source: Phocas Software