I don’t like making predictions, so rest assured this is not another of a myriad of predictions articles that hit the media annually. Instead, let’s kick start the year with some definite plans and aspirations of companies in the business intelligence sphere. A great place for an insightful, real-world view of BI trends is my weekly #BIWisdom tweetchats with BI customers, vendors and consultants.
What is your organization planning to try to achieve in 2014? When I recently asked the #BIWisdom tribe this question, their tweets made it immediately clear that their companies are gearing up for achieving even greater value from business intelligence than they have to date.
Plans Include:
• More mobile BI
• More BI demos with real-life applications
• Get more into mobile BI as it helps to reach the masses and get closer to “Information Democracy”
• Explore the sharing potential of BI and the power to integrate additional sources at any point in the BI stack
• BI methodology is big on our checklist for this year
• Get up to speed with some of the specialized tools in the BI stack; it’s hard to keep up with the toolsets released so far for data integration, data quality, data management and data security
• Migrating to current versions of BI software; for innovations in BI software you need the newest versions. Examples: user empowerment and the speed of getting answers (not just reports)
• There is a growing interest in data that tells stories; keep up with advances in storyboarding to package visual analytics that might fill some gaps in communication and collaboration
• Monitor rumblings about trend to shift data to secure storage outside the U.S. due to the NSA revelations
• Expand basic BI to more users (not just multi-page dashboards, but targeted BI); mobile BI will certainly drive the expansion
• Have BI super-users engage with others to expand the penetration of BI among users
• Increase use of self-service products to provide more value and increase adoption of BI tools
Aspirations:
• More predictive analytics to learn more about Big Data
• Expand more into embedded BI
• Do more with text analytics; there’s a lot to mine from text analysis
Location intelligence:
The group also tweeted about a new thrust in business intelligence functionality — location intelligence or location analytics. Will it have legs in 2014, I asked? Definitely, they responded.
One person tweeted: “I’m close to this topic and see activity and a lot of interest growing in this area.”
Another tweeted, “Through the use of location analytics organization can see new patterns in their data that graphs and charts don’t reveal.”
Mobile and location are intertwined — two sides of the same coin — so it should have legs this year. Here at Dresner Advisory Services we’ll publish a report on our first Wisdom of Crowds® Market Study on Location Intelligence in February 2014.
Bottom line:
The #BIWisdom tribe’s tweets aren’t mere hopes. These folks are not punching above their weight. They have experienced success with BI so far and are building on that success to mine for greater value.
Judging by their comments, we have new BI trends to monitor as we watch the “2014ization” of BI unfold. Which trends will rise to prominence?
I’d love to know what plans and aspirations your company has for 2014. Please post your comment.
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Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.
