Business Intelligence Trends: What are the top business intelligence trends to track in 2011?

In 2011, we will continue to see the beginnings of better focus on how BI and analytics are utilized in enterprises to start improving approaches to BI and BI outputs. Effective BI going forward is not just about software technology -- it’s about asking the right questions and understanding if the BI-generated answers make sense – to achieve better intelligence for the business. A lot of data and content that matter come with a short shelf life of significance. The new direction for many analytics solutions should bring this information more quickly into intelligence processes. As Enterprises incorporate changes inside and out to move towards the “social business”, more focus falls on the human element as truly significant factors for business success. 2011 will see shifts to the strategic use of BI across all groups in the enterprise to encompass many important data points to lift decision-making from silos of information.
-- Collaboration
One newer area of interest to watch in 2011 for BI / analytics solutions is the inclusion of collaborative activities to add contextual and qualitative layers to the output of BI processes. And disruptive BI solutions will aggressively incorporate collaboration. Effective collaboration is not technology-centric – BI solutions that include collaborative capabilities will have to support the human side of collaboration. Collaboration is far more than distributing and sharing documents. It is interactive, inclusive, non-silo’d. If collaboration is to be part of analytics, then iterative collaborative processes should be established throughout analytics cycles. Collaboration for analytics means bringing in disparate people to test assumptions, validity of data sources, accuracy and relevance of the outputs.
-- Understanding BI
A trend continuing into 2011 is self-service BI for business users. While there are very interesting analytics solutions that are “friendly” to business users, it is essential that safeguards are in place to ensure that business users understand what they are doing with analytic models and whether the resulting “intelligence” artifacts are correct, meaningful and useful. So for self-service BI to succeed as a tool for business users, again the solution has to be more than technology. BI tech vendors will have to provide guidance for every step of using the analytics solution to ensure proper outcomes. To connect with these “new” analytics users, vendors have to help them understand why they need analytics and how to use it.
-- Focus on Predictive Analytics/Data Visualizations
Some of the significant changes to analytics solutions relate to how final artifacts are “formatted”. There has been a growing transition from traditional report formats to interactive visualization tools, and to collaborative processes that enhance the final artifacts. More companies want BI to help with current and future needs and goals, rather than measuring the past. And these companies should be inviting in more and more individuals (via collaboration) to help refine the accuracy and contributions of analytics outputs. Newer on-demand BI / analytics solutions are providing “right now” intelligence, though still these are still works-in-progress. As we move further into 2011, we will see these solutions evolve.
-- And Underneath: Reliable data
Going into 2011, there is more awareness of the need for basing any data-driven intelligence / analytics processes on reliable data, whether structured or unstructured. While it’s the right direction to provide analytics tools that work well for business users and increase ease-of-implementation and ease-of-use, diligence must be exercised to guarantee that data sources fed into analytic processes are trustworthy. There are many indications that 2011 will see increased commitments to data quality and data governance to ensure reliable data flows into BI / analytics processes.

In no particular order:

1. Smartphone apps. Applications that make access to BI-type info and packaged reports/analysis from an iPhone or smartphone will be more numerous, more visible, and more powerful by the end of 2011. It would be nice if these apps resulted in a "killer app portfolio" that gave a better justification for mobile BI, but I'm not counting on it.

2. Agile BI realism. Enough SMBs and divisions of large enterprises will have kicked the tires on actual implementations of fast-deployment BI that best practices and better targeting will ensue.

3. More social media information infusion in BI. Note, however, that this will probably be mainly via superficial "clickstream"-type metrics.

4. More on-the-ground embedded analytics -- that is, putting BI-type monitoring in existing business-function apps ranging from network management to ERP. This is already happening in software-vendor suites, but has not yet been implemented widely in large enterprises.

5. Increased BI causes increased strain on enterprise (information) security strategies even if the organization is slow to move to the cloud, because of the increasing importance of information stored physically outside the organization.

One of the top trends for business intelligence in 2011 is the movement towards utilization of Social Data. There are over 250 major social media and networking sites producing data that can be incorporated into enterprise business intelligence environments. Social data analytics delivers behavioral, sentiment, social graph and video/audio data to decision makers allowing them a greater level of insight when executing BI. Look for this trend to accelerate in 2011 as integration issues are overcome to make this type of a data easily accessible.

BI on mobile devices - getting closer to the 'right data, right information, right insight, right time, right person' mantra of BI.

Perhaps more operational BI - in support of the above as well. Not just a dashboard of eye-candy for an executive, but real insight escalated where it needs to go so the needle on the dial upstairs never moves into a critical state.

BI on BI - having insight into the use of BI across the enterprise allows better/smarter investment in BI.

Trends I foresee for Business Intelligence in the next year:

1. Better visualization - With the popularity that infographics are gaining in mainstream media, I've started seeing a lot of businesses want better looking visualizations for their data. We'll always have the people that just want an Excel data dump, but the decision makers don't have time for thousands of lines of raw data. Quick, simple graphics that aid in intelligent decisions are increasing in popularity.

2. Simplification of concepts - Now that everyone theoretically has access to "all" of their data, they are realizing the paralyzing effects of that situation. Focusing on trends and outliers is really the only way to analyze enterprise wide input. Solution providers who are able to quickly deliver intelligent decision making tools will rise to the top of this market!

3. Textual analysis - I know the bandwagon is to say that social media is the next big wave of analytics (and there is possibly some truth to that), but the problem lies in the fact that existing intelligence tools depend upon attribute and numeric entries and are largely incapable of analyzing purely text based data. As we seek to make more intelligent decisions, we will need to learn how to automate the curation of textual information; this includes social media, email, contracts, and other forms of largely textual data that companies have access to. Social media is only a portion of this arena and will depend on Business Intelligence's capability to actually analyze the content it contains.

4. New audiences - Historically, formalized Business Intelligence has targeted the corporate enterprise as a customer. There are obvious benefits to this (larger budgets!) but the competition is becoming fierce. Largely ignored have been smaller businesses. While the offering should not be as customized as a corporation that can afford developers to modify everything, providing out of the box solutions that end users can intuitively adapt to their business processes will have a successful market. These products need to be very specialized to the types of data that they report on instead of the larger solutions that tend to allow for everything under the corporate sun. (Google Analytics for web based analysis is an example of this though it would benefit from more intuitive tools for actually making decisions.)

I can see a few BI/ Analytics trends for 2011.

As the global market for Business Intelligence and Analytics continues to experience double digit growth, BI vendors from around the globe will offer creative and lower cost solutions to gain share in the mid and small size company segments that are turning to BI for the first time.

Cloud computing vendors will expand their offering to include ETL, Data warehouse, reporting, OLAP, advanced visualization and dashboards in one package for the early adopters that moved passed the security concerns.

Software companies will follow IBM-Cognos lead and will integrate advanced statistical packages and predictive analytics modeling into their current BI solutions.

More vendors will offer better mobile BI, analytics and advanced visualization applications.

More companies will realize that they can use BI/ Analytics beyond the back office tactical day-to-day operation. They will start to exploit the power of BI software to perform strategic and competitive analysis on the fly to understand market trends better than the competition and increase market share, revenue and profit.

More companies will realize that the semantic quality of their data is constraining the Business Analytics results. They will start to cleanse, organize and structure the data to contain more strategic meaning and provide direction to grow the business.

Some companies will gradually realize they have built unnecessary complexities in the configuration of analytic, BI tools and data marts. While this isn’t an impediment to IT or analyst experts, it causes casual business users to underutilize or not utilize the systems. This will gradually change towards a more business intuitive, self serve “analytics for the masses” model.

Regards, Bill

Here are some of the BI trends I think could be important in 2011.
Social Media as Shawn says above. As it becomes ever more prominent, it is becoming more and more important for groups to pay attention to what is happening in the social media universe, and BI solutions can help organizations capitalize on this. Analysts such as Gartner have predicted a social future for business intelligence – i.e. businesses that leverage social media within their business intelligence software will gain an advantage over others. Business intelligence software developers should be taking note and making their analytics and reporting offerings more “social” by taking the technologies and principles behind Twitter, LinkedIn etc. and applying them to their solutions.
Small Business. Business intelligence is getting simpler and easier to setup as more and more vendors try to enter the market. This will enable smaller companies to take advantage of business intelligence.
End-User Driven Visualization. Large reports, even end-user driven ones are pretty useless if they just present large amounts of data in text format or similar. Some feel that users should not have to take it upon themselves to learn the ins and outs of data visualization themselves, when the tool itself could do it for you. Intelligent intuitive tools that can understand the context of the data being presented and can choose one or a few of the most appropriate ways of displaying the information would be huge.

I'll be looking for further expansion into the mainstream of the columnar/vertical players. There are obvious leaders who exist already but watch for Microsoft to make a stronger play into this space, following on from their PowerPivot release this year just past.

I agree with Shawn that we may see more utilization of existing social data, though am not sure I see the value that you're outlining Kirsty in making the content we use more social. BI, or more pointedly, the results/reports/analyses created have always been social/shared and I personally see more traction in mining the existing social resources for sentiment related to your current analysis than simply utilizing the same frameworks to distribute your findings.

What I really hope for is some significant forward movement in the BI arena - while each vendor slowly brings us a little further forward, it does seem to be a very slow tide moving. Honestly reflect on where Cognos was in 95, or Microsoft in 2000 and where these two major vendors are today - and now compare this to say cellphone tech (admitedly, significantly a mainstream/consumer technology, but hey, everyone says that they're bringing 'BI to the masses').

@Thomas - would you see the mobile and operational converging? I've seen BI on mobile for a while from many vendors (heck,I even wrote a SSAS query tool using WAP 'back in the day') but for me, the dashboard is one thing, the operational alert, telling a user to do/not do sell/not sell etc based on operational BI results (likely including realtime data mining) is definitely useful.

Most of the previous contributors have covered the high-visibility trends, and I would have to agree with social networking for BI, mobile BI and visualization as the top three trends for 2011. I'd like to focus on a few more subtle, but very fundamental trends that I believe will begin to change the landscape for this year.

1. Analytics beyond the data warehouse environment, often called "big data". This is going to be a growing issue or opportunity this year, depending on your point of view. There's no doubt that Hadoop, MapReduce and the whole Open Source, hand-built, parallelized application environment is driving ahead full steam. There are significant business opportunities to be realized here, so it's going to grow. The issue is how the traditional BI support team is going to react; and eventually support it. They have to coexist if the organization is going to have some consistency of informational decision support.

2. Services Oriented Architecture. Yes, I know, we've been talking about this for years, but its influence continues to grow. Tooling has matured and many long-running SOA projects in the operational environment are coming to fruition. As they do, the distinction between operational and informational processes becomes further blurred - in the eyes of end users, at least. BI teams will have to start paying real attention to what's called "operational BI", but is really the inclusion of informational activities in operational workflows.

3. The rise of the Millennial Generation. This is the most subtle trend, and will continue way beyond 2011. The Millennials (born 1980-2000) are a growing force in the workplace and are beginning to move into positions of power. Sociologists suggest their attitudes to work, collaboration, authority and what motivates them in general are very different to the current workforce - in large part Generation X. The Millennials are already the driving force behind the social networking phenomenon. How decisions are made and implemented is now becoming a growing focus for them. This will drive big changes in BI.

Like Thomas, I definitely see an increase in Mobile BI, particularly in support of operational BI, near-real-time data with alerts to detect performance data moving out of threshold. An early warning system for trends -- good and bad -- is within reach and already in use by innovators. One shift I see, though, is the persona of Mobile BI user. Traditionally, we'd thought of the busy exec on the go wanting to stay tapped in. An emerging trend I'm seeing now is the adoption of mobile BI by line-of-business managers and reps.

There are few trends which I feel important from BI prospective in 2011
1. Social networking :
Social networking sites which will play bigger role in so many areas. It will be more towards how this social networking sites will be used to influence your buying decision. Just think about it, if I would like to buy a car and I know my budget how much I am going to spend. I will do some research, visit some show rooms and decide what I wanted to buy. To make sure whatever decision I am taking would like to take feedback from my network like face book. I share this with my connections, they can provide me a feedback if somebody within my network says I also have this car but having some issues or if he gives positive feedback ultimately can influence my decision directly.
You can see these sites will be so influential to influence your buying decisions. There is a great future to work for these companies like face book.

2. Tablet PC :
It is very hot. You will see more and more people using tablet pc going forward in 2011. There are so many small companies in the market giving competition to Apple in this areas. Companies will start using this more and more specially for the sales and marketing people. From BI prospective BI related vendors will come up with application which can run on this tablets so that sales/marketing people can see opportunity /sales dashboards on these devices. You will see more and more companies certifying their dash boarding tools on these tablets to promote their applications.
3. All about data :
Going forwards it will be all about data. Companies will start collecting lots of data to do so much of analysis including customer behavior which is very important. You will see IT professionals talking a lot about data, data and data...
4. DW Appliances :
The trend will continue to capture more and more data. Underneath hardware/network need to support all this data. More and more companies will start looking for readymade appliances which can be ready to deploy within record time. There are lot many appliances available in the market and you will see companies deploying more and more DW appliances.

Mobile BI, concerning in particular tablet devices (e.g. iPad) and the possibility to analyse data while disconnected from the server.

Right time analytics, mixing historical and event driven data.

Location Intelligence, mixing analytical and geographical data and allowing to perform queries and analysis on geo-related data

The possibility to manage large volumes of data (e.g Hadoop like frameworks) in particular when dealing with social data analytics and text mining.

Cloud BI, providing BI as a service and enforcing multitenancy

and finally, what I'm deeply involved in, Open Source BI with its recognized set of mature solutions (SpagoBI, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Actuate) and its innovating nature, substained by open and flexible business models