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Top 3 Business Intelligence Trends for 2011
Top 3 trends for 2011
Based on our day to day interaction with our customers, and the developments we see in the market, we see three trends in particular emerging in 2011.
Business or social? Facebook is focused absolutely on what its users want to do. Business applications are only just embracing user experience and enabling access to functions fundamental to peoples’ ability to do their jobs. Applications tend to be process driven and not recognise that information technology (IT, remember?) is what it’s all about. There’s a reason applications all ship with some reporting mechanism or other. In 2011 we’ll see the beginnings of a move towards corporate application suites focusing on information delivery to support the decisions people have to make and capable of supporting the sort of flexibility we all need in a more mobile, networked workplace. The application suite itself may not even be bought outright and, instead, hosted in a federated data centre and paid for per user, per month. BI and the operational application will become entwined and the companies that don’t embrace information delivery as a critical output of investments in IT will cease to compete.
It’s the user, dummy. Technical enhancements in data warehousing underpin a sea change in BI: the shift from IT to the user. Now anybody in the business can carry out the analysis of transactional operational data. In memory processing breaks the mould of traditional report delivery. The user no longer needs to know how to ask the question according to how IT have built the system. Now the user doesn’t even need to know what they’re setting out to find out, they just follow their noses. Consequently, BI processes and interfaces need to be rethought to embrace the user, both in day to day operational terms and in terms of how solutions are delivered. The big bang is gone. Collaborative, iterative releases reduce risk, increase user adoption and massively reduce a customer’s time to value.
Business or social, part 2. The ability to mix corporate and personal data for quick analysis is a common need. As blogs, social networks and consumer review sites drive customer choice and retention, companies’ analysis of their markets is rendered incomplete by the absence from their systems of publicly available data. Moreover, the solution – scraping data into a local data store – wholly undermines information governance and data protection legislation. In 2011 look out for big advances in the release and adoption of systems that let businesses – and individuals – hive off data into protected spaces behind the firewall, so enabling full analytical capabilities without exposing the business to compliance breaches.
If you are considering your BI strategy and want to get to the heart of your business challenges contact us to arrange your Complimentary BI Discovery Workshop, email bi@panacea.co.uk or call us on o844 225 2480
Tags: BI Trends, Business, compliance, data warehousing, Facebook, IT, social