2012 has emerged
to be a promising year for Business Intelligence (BI) with several notable
trends, which will continue to dominate the future. With technological progress
and proliferation of data, today’s BI and analytics apps are built to access
the data faster and for its easier consumption by the business owners. Here is
a list of some top trends, which will impact BI and its users in the coming
years. Holding a deep understanding of these trends and applying them to
business will update the business to stay an edge over the competition.
Top
Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence
Mobile BI
and Accessibility
The hype
around enabling smartphones & tablets for BI is increasing rapidly as they
help the business managers and decision makers to make decisions much faster,
anytime anywhere. Mobile
BI is identified by the industry analysts as one of the fastest growing
trend which gives the business users access to their dashboards and critical
business information on their handheld smartphones and tablet devices. This
empowers an improvement in sales and services.
Cloud Based
BI
With the
whole of IT world embracing cloud computing technology, Business
Intelligence is no exception. Cloud based BI helps enterprises save IT
costs and access data much faster that puts data analytics at ease. However,
cloud based implementation of BI requires a defined and secure strategy for its
success.
Big Data
Big Data is growing faster as volume of data increases in
the organizations and assists businesses to make critical decisions in near
real-time. Most of the BI projects use Big Data as part of their data landscape
for the value it delivers.
A recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive reported
that small businesses are moving faster than larger competitors to leverage Big
Data—28 percent identified Big Data as the massive growth in transaction data, while
24 percent said that it is the new technology that addresses volume, variety
and velocity challenges of Big Data. The surging information from social media,
mobile devices and machine-generated devices was cited by 18 percent as their
definition of Big Data, while 19 percent characterized it as the requirement to
store and archive data for regulatory compliance. The survey also indicates the
awareness of SMEs on the benefits of Big Data—over 70 percent expects the ROI
on Big Data within a year. 59 percent of organizations quoted that efficient
business operations as primary benefit, and capable to boost sales by 54
percent, 50 percent says higher savings on IT costs, improve business agility
by 48 percent, and attract and retain customers by 46 percent.
It is thus evident that companies understand the benefits
Big Data can offer their businesses and realize the competitive advantage it
can hold.
Self-Service BI
Today, BI
has grown more than a technology as companies around the world demand for
relevant and faster access of data to take swift decisions. Self-service BI
grants access to non-technical professionals who can create their own dashboards
as per their specific needs, thus making them less dependent on the IT.
In-Memory
Analytics
In Business
Intelligence, in-memory analytics is a methodology that helps to save time in
accessing analytics. It works by increasing the speed, performance and
reliability of the BI system when querying data. It thus provides its users, faster
answers when compared to the disk-based system.
Open Source
BI
The top
reason why companies often choose open source Business Intelligence is its “lower
costs”. It also provides an easy access to all of the enterprise’s projects in
progress. The open source BI is gaining momentum in the current trend and is being
implemented by small, medium and large companies.
Social
Media BI
Most
business houses today, have official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages where
they promote their brand. With social media’s significance in businesses
escalating drastically, companies collect and analyze the data of their
customers and other users where BI plays a vital role by obtaining social media
stats and analysis reports.
Collaborative
BI
With social media getting more
prominent in businesses today, BI with social capabilities is yet another
emerging platform where users can now share information and work more
collaboratively. Social integrated BI solution helps the
enterprises to provide their workforce a collaborative platform and increase
their productivity.
