About 10 years ago, business intelligence (BI) was more report-centric, but there is a shift whereby it is becoming user-centric.
So said Nicholas Bell, CEO of BI solutions provider Decision Inc, in an interview with ITWeb last week.
"Organisations today are looking to be as efficient as possible. The old approach to BI was report-centric and this is changing. Organisations are asking more frequently about technology that enables faster decision-making, and they want to use information to gain competitive advantage."
He pointed out the growth of BI self-service applications on the market is proof BI vendors are pushing to put the decision-making power into users' hands.
"BI, 10 years ago, was a very much an IT-run operation, but to realise its benefits, you have to put the power into the users' hands. Let IT focus on what it is good at doing - driving efficiencies," said Bell.
"I see BI becoming more user-centric. If you look at our daily lives, everything is being pushed to the mobile device - the applications, the Web, etc. People are used to that in their lives - things being done quicker and decisions being made in a short space of time."
A lot of the BI applications now run on mobile devices, he noted. "The visualisations on your PC and those on your tablet or smartphone are just the same. There is a lot of integration of these applications as people are getting more impatient in making decisions."
He believes data visualisation helps business leaders predict what will happen next. "If you look at data, traditionally, there was a lot of interpretation required of the user from a decision-making point of view."
Visualisation is changing this by using visuals and other objects that allow outliers and exceptions to be more visible, quicker and simpler, he explained.
According to Bell, visualisation makes it easier for businesses to understand information, especially aspects like pattern recognition.
"We typically use two things when making decisions - pattern recognition and emotional tagging. Pattern recognition is the ability to recognise patterns and compare them to things seen before and make a decision based on that. Visualisation makes that pattern recognition neater."
He also noted social media is playing a big role in BI nowadays, as organisations seek to analyse what customers think of them.
A recent example is the Cell C banner debacle - the customer sentiment was very negative and it even went to social media, said Bell.
"So, understanding how your customers react to the decisions you make is very important, particularly to companies working on a business-to-customer model. This is because clients today have a lot of choices; you are no longer the only option out there."
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