This is a guest blog post by Marcus Borba (@marcusborba), the founder of Borba Consulting, a Business Intelligence and Performance Management consultancy located in Brazil. Marcus has over 10 years of experience providing consulting services to designing and implementing business intelligence and performance management solutions. He also writes a blog called Business Intelligence News.
Since my last post on trends in Business Intelligence, the landscape has continued to change—and even faster. Here’s an update on progress in the seven categories discussed last time.
- Mobile BI. What’s new? Improved functionality and lower pricing for smartphones and tablets has led to continuing growth in the number of mobile data consumers. In turn, anytime/anywhere access to decision support and operational updates is demonstrating the value of BI. This virtuous circle is rapidly turning the long-predicted promise of Mobile BI into a reality. Insight: Get an overview of the Mobile BI landscape from analyst Boris Evelson.
- Collaborative BI. What’s new? In terms of adoption—not much just yet. Most companies are taking a cautious approach to “social” or “collaborative” BI, often due to concerns about accuracy and/or confusion when data is shared among peers rather than accessed from a central source. But Facebook-style interactive tools are seen more frequently now in BI products, and the challenge for organizations will be finding the best way to make use of these capabilities.
- Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis. What’s new? The field of text analytics continues to be one of the fastest growing areas in BI. Because use of social media is now so widespread among consumers, organizations are increasingly eager to explore text data—and they are looking beyond opinions and comments to discover new ideas and gain competitive edge.
- In-Memory Analytics. What’s new? Now that cheaper chips and a range of mature product offerings have made in-memory processing a practical reality, businesses are busy figuring out how best to use the speed and increased accessibility it provides. Insight: Review some of the relevant considerations regarding deployment of in-memory analytics.
- Advanced Visualization. What’s new? The big driver for development of advanced data visualization capabilities inside corporations is the increased exposure to sophisticated information graphics in everyday life. Now that people are accustomed to a very high level of quality in visualizations, interactive pie charts and “3D” bar graphs just can’t sustain interest. Insight: Find out more about trends in visualization design.
- Agile BI. What’s new? Increasing demands for decision support and operational BI are forcing IT organizations to come up with faster solutions. Speed of change can make a traditional BI project obsolete before it’s even rolled out, so agility is becoming the new buzzword in some companies. Insight: Explore some key concepts and case studies in agile BI.
- BI in the Cloud. What’s new? From the business side, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) BI may have a lot of appeal—there’s no doubt that a SaaS solution can be faster, easier, and cheaper than traditional BI development. But from an IT perspective, there are a lot of reasons to think carefully about this strategy, so there will continue to be explorations and negotiations before SaaS BI establishes a place in the enterprise.
Two other trends receiving attention these days: open source BI and self-service BI. A little more on those concepts next week in Part Two of this update.
