Change is coming. And for most businesses, it can’t get here fast enough. But are you ready for better business intelligence? Here’s what to expect.
More users than ever before are taking advantage of BI systems. And they’re going all-in. In a report by Howard Dresner, President, Founder, and Chief Research Officer at Dresner Advisory Services, more than 81% of business organizations reported having plans to roll out BI more fully in the years leading up to 2019. What’s exciting about this growth is that IT and upper management NIL no longer leading it. Frontline departments like R&D, sales, and marketing are getting in on the action, taking advantage of the growing opportunities BI has to offer. As more diverse users demand access to business analytics, organizations will need to interact with vast amounts of data from a wider variety of sources. It’s fast. It’s exciting. It’s A LOT to manage. And IT simply can’t keep up. The solution?
According to Ani Manian, Head of Product Strategy at Sisense, “[Data complexity] will be the primary barrier standing between you and [your ability to] use BI on a day-to-day basis.” Business teams must be able to consume data insights — anytime, anywhere quickly.
Leading organizations will rely on fewer, better tools to achieve new levels of user-friendly utility. What will this look like? Take, for example, the traditional monolithic dashboard. As data sources become more diverse and fragmented, organizations will say goodbye to rigid dashboards and ‘Hello! Where have you been all my life?’ to dynamic, customized dashboards created through the atomization, deconstruction, and rebuilding of current tools. We’ll also see a big increase in the use of bots, natural language analytics, and smart devices to make data insights as ubiquitous as possible. Getting prepped for a big video conference? Don’t wait for Joe from Marketing to get back to you with the info you need. Ask Amazon Echo and instantly get your answer through Alexa. This kind of user self-service will finally become a reality (and IT will finally get some reprieve). And that’s not all.
Embedded analytics will take this a step further by enabling greater cross-departmental collaboration. Forget migraine-inducing reply-all email chains. With embedded analytics in business apps, users will be able to annotate various objects in a dashboard or chart and use these tools to build an interactive presentation and share their analysis in a way other teams, or even external stakeholders can understand. That’s right. Your customer support team can walk customers through their answers step-by-step using annotated screen grabs, gifs, and more. It’s business storytelling. No PowerPoint needed.
We can’t talk about BI without talking about AI. (Sorry, we just can’t.) As one of the top trending business topics of 2016, AI and machine learning will stay in center focus.
