8 Analytics Trends That Will Shape Your Future
Analytics is a fundamental part of the future digital economy. To be successful, you must recognize growing trends that will impact your analytics program.
CIOs around the world are increasingly focused on the digital transformation of their businesses, partly because their CEOs are increasingly recognizing that digital business is the key to success in their future. As they evaluate how to drive their digital transformations, a top investment priority is business intelligence and analytics. Data is the fuel that powers the digital economy and analytics is the mechanism that transforms that raw material into usable assets that will make them successful. A good understanding of analytics trends is critical for CIOs and their teams across all industries.
Analytics Is Becoming an Experience
Unlike business intelligence efforts of the past (which focused on delivering beautiful charts and graphs that captured the state of the business), analytics of the future will be a contextual experience. Analytics is now as much about how information is received and consumed as it is about the message to be delivered. A high degree of personalization based on context is becoming a critical aspect of any analytics program.
Location and Time of the User
Effective analytics is starting to consider the information consumer’s location and time of day to optimize the user experience. For example, the time zone of the recipient is now more important than the time zone of a report creator. Location-aware analytics is also gaining importance; your user’s location is now another input that determines what information your user receives.
As the number of devices expands to include mobile phones, watches, glasses, in-car displays, digital personal assistants, and even video gaming systems, the end consumption point becomes more vital in the delivery of impactful analytics. Unlike the era when most information consumers were on a computer with enough real estate on their screen to consume tables and charts full of data, today’s consumer needs the information delivered in a format optimized for their current mobile device. With multiple devices per person, the content must be personalized not only by user but also by the user’s device characteristics.
The Rise of the User Journey
The user journey is becoming more prevalent in analytics. Recipients of analytics results include customers, partners, and internal business decision makers. Each of these individuals has interacted with your business in different ways. All those historical interaction points create the journey that individuals have taken. As analytics evolves, data points from this journey will personalize what, when, and how information is delivered.
If you are communicating with a customer, knowing their interaction history, past purchases, and what information has been sent to them creates a unique point-in-time need for information. A B2B relationship with a business partner or communication with an internal decision maker must also consider the user journey. Increased personalization will become paramount in effectively delivering analytics to drive business results.
With an increased reliance on the Internet of Things (IoT) and corresponding streaming data, the window to capture, analyze, and respond shortens.
