An HP report on the top 10 trends in business intelligence has revealed an increasing demand for operational business intelligence (BI), a focus on information quality and the use of Web 2.0 technologies for BI.
“These trends reflect the profound shift that business intelligence is undergoing as organisations prioritise information management. Increasingly, businesses recognise how BI empowers employees from many disciplines to make better decisions with more information at hand,” says Valerie Logan, HP consulting and integration information management leader.
Top trends
According to the report, the top BI trend is vendor consolidation, which marks the maturation of BI as a technology platform, along with related information management applications such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management. Consolidation offers potential benefits for CIOs who expect vendors to perform more integration.
The second most important trend listed is the increased opportunities which come in as a result of operational BI. “Operational BI places timely information into the hands of operational-level workers to help them make day-to-day decisions. With the right information, identity theft can be recognised more easily, and suppliers can keep up with inventory demands during peak periods,” explains Logan.
The increasing use of analytics in business strategy execution is listed as the next trend. Logan says companies are now linking enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and supply chain management systems with analytics tools. “This enables real-time decision-making that can improve processes, production and pricing,” says Logan.
Integrating BI
The movement of data quality towards becoming a part of the business agenda is a trend which will require business strategists and IT professionals to collaborate and leverage the value of BI.
The shift of IT governance into the three different levels in the organisation, namely enterprise; interdivisional and local is another visible trend. “Governance, which is crucial to implementing a successful BI strategy, must tie business and technology tightly. Companies will begin to move from theory to practice, recognising the complexities of governance,” says Logan.
Businesses are increasingly recognising the value of unstructured information. Logan explains that customer, vendor and market information is buried in employee e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, Webcasts, instant messages and other unstructured data. The challenge for BI technologies is to process this unstructured data into actionable insights which comply with document discovery regulations, she said.
Evolving BI
For BI, the emphasis going forward will be on flexible solutions that speed time to value, are built with industry-standard components and easily integrate into the existing BI infrastructure. The integration of BI and Microsoft Excel to create managed spreadsheets which can be used with desktop tools to view and analyse data, is another growing trend. The BI experience is also being reshaped through the integration of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social networks in BI solutions.
Finally, the need for BI talent is growing as broader BI deployments bring about an increased need for senior practitioners who understand business processes, statistics, and data analysis as it pertains to their specific industry. This increased demand, together with pressures to reduce costs, may force companies to reconsider offshore outsourcing.
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