2017 Business Intelligence Trends Predictions
The BI industry carefully monitors business trends on a year to year basis. Majority of these trends are largely influenced by data production and the use of corporate data to gain a competitive advantage. Meta-trends also influence the BI market. These Meta trends are: Digitalization, Consumerization, Agility, Security, Analytics, Cloud, Mobile, and Artificial Intelligence.
Performance Canvas forecasts the top 5 business trends for 2017 based on the conversations it had initiated with 300 of its customers and consultants on their take on the most important BI trends.
1. Data Discovery and Visualization
2017 will see a higher demand for more powerful graphics and more advanced cloud authoring capabilities. The BI experts at Performance Canvas believe that while many organizations are interested in data discovery, the trend to watch out for in 2017 is Governed Data Discovery.
The whole idea of Data Discovery is that you put the power of data analysis into the hands of individuals without having to deal with the underlying problems brought about by IT-controlled BI systems but the reality today is that many organizations still struggle with major excel-like governance problems. Governed Data discovery then ensures that there is integrity and trust when it comes to the analytic practices of the company.
2. Self-service BI
In 2017, self-service analysis will move beyond just self-service for analysts. Instead, it will enter an era of social media-like access to information for everyone with the aid of user friendly interfaces and apps.
2017 will see a high demand for a single, reliable, and easy to use BI environment that grants access to users, sharing of content, and at the same time granting power to administrators to have the necessary oversight to guarantee results based on a single set of data.
3. Data Quality Management
This year, many companies learned the importance of Data Quality Management the hard way. 2017 will see a shift on significant funding for investing on data quality management.
Having understood the importance of the partnership of business units and BI technology in this aspect, companies will now look at whether or not specific BI tools can support the four pillars of data quality management – Data Profiling, Data Quality, Data Integration, Data Augmentation.
4. Analytical Databases
2017 will be a remarkable year for SQL because even the largest sets of data can be analyzed using SQL-based technology.
2017 will see a higher demand from companies to continue to leverage Hadoop´s ability to run analytics directly in clusters with the help of SQL query engines´ speed and flexibility.
5. Growth in Cloud-based data Sources
The tremendous growth of cloud-based applications and data sources in 2016 is one of the main reason for the increase in SaaS BI deployments. This means in 2017, there will be a greater need for BI solutions that can empower users to connect, analyze, and integrate information into a more company-wide reporting initiatives.
BI solutions in 2017 need to make sure they can allow for easier and faster analysis of data contained within cloud applications like YouTube, twitter or Google Analytics.
Forbes declared that Data Scientist is the best job in 2016. This is a 5 point jump from being 6th best job in the last year. This is not surprising of course considering there is high demand for data needs in various industries ranging from government, manufacturing, health care, etc.
It is apparent that there are no major significant changes in the ranking of the BI trends for 2017 in comparison the previous year. 2017 will see a significant investment for BI tools to aid companies in their data use in order to stay ahead of competitors.