What are some BI trends that we have seen in 2010?

SaaS and Cloud Computing seem to the most popular among my readers. The movement toward SaaS based business intelligence has the attention of CIO's. The lure of faster implementation and smaller initial capital expenses can't be ignored. SaaS is also doing a good job delivering BI to a wider user population within the enterprise.

Some trends I see from reading press releases posted at DSSResources.com and checking with vendors include:

1) Mobile BI, BI dashboards and query tools on smart phones.

2) More visualization for data sets.

3) Improved open source BI.

4) More operational BI implementations.

Here are a few things that we're seeing, as a BI vendor ourselves:

1. Greater embrace of a portfolio BI strategy. There was a rush to consolidate, with the assumption that having one "throat to choke" was the best option. However, not all BI tools fit all needs, and some traditional BI implementations are difficult to scale or adapt. So there's a greater embrace of a portfolio of solutions. You might keep your on-premise BI solution for its current usage, but use the cheaper, faster SaaS BI solution for new projects.

2. Mobile BI. This one took us a bit by surprise, since we keep seeing stories that Mobile BI is hype. However, we had to expand to a mobile solution by customer demand. We're a SaaS company, so this was easier for us to do - we simply run our application through your mobile browser.

3. BI for more departments and closer to the front lines. As BI becomes more affordable and flexible, you can deploy it to groups who need it, but couldn't get it before. This is typically sales, marketing, HR, and operations.

4. Greater collaboration. People expect greater interaction with their colleagues, not to simply quietly receive information. So the ability to recut reports a different way and comment on the reporting is increasingly demanded.

In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I work for Birst (www.birst.com).

One of the trends is "Agile BI". On it's own, this is nothing new, but there is a new angle on that: software to facilitate the agile approach. There is a lot of attention for Data Warehouse Automation Tools (or Data Warehouse Life Cycle management software). Time and costs savings are basic pros, but the real business value is the incremental approach, that allows prototyping, flexibility, better time to market and standardization.

Well, I have worked for companies with no software platform at all to organise their business processes. This in turn has been a set back because they ended up having a lot of problems managing their systems.
Some of these organisations have embraced ERP solutions like Microsoft Dynamics to control their processes and this has been of great help.

At some point, serious focus on improving the quality and structure of the data will have to take place, especially when considering that only 12% of all data is to some extent structured.

In large and mid size companies the technology is light-years ahead of the quality and structure of the data. It’s common to see state of the art Business Intelligence software that cannot deliver strategic direction or analysis until armies of analysts download the data into spreadsheets, manipulate, fix and structure the data manually, for hours or days at a time.

In my experience, even after years and millions of dollars spent in BI deployment, Marketing and Sales organizations feel like they are drowning in an ocean of data and yet thirsty for the Strategic Knowledge they need to grow the business.

Every time someone needs a quick answer about market share, profitability or growth of a particular market, product line or customer, it takes weeks to go through the process of running the right queries, exporting them to Microsoft Excel, manually cleansing data errors, adding look-ups from other data sources, and finally creating pivot tables to find the right answers. Even worse, they have to go through the entire process over and over again every time they need a progress update, either the following week or at month-end, quarter-end or year-end for each one of the business units and markets they serve.

I can’t help but ask, Is this a good use of marketing and sales people’s time? Shouldn’t they be investing that time doing market research or in front of customers finding opportunities to grow the business?

In addition, a large portion of team meetings is spent arguing whose data is correct instead of focusing on the critical issues. The numbers generated by Finance do not agree with the analysis performed by Marketing or the explanations provided by Sales. They need a single version of the truth, but different folks run different queries, made different data cleansing assumptions and customized their spreadsheets based on different metrics.

On the other hand, when data is properly structured by Marketing & Sales, before being loaded into the applications, and BI tools are configured in a manner intuitive to the users, the software now provides the answers the strategic commercial folks need to grow the business.

The teams finally share a single version of the truth. Now analyses run by Finance are in agreement with those run by Marketing and Sales, right from the BI application since manipulation of the data in spreadsheets is no longer necessary.

Configuring the BI software to perform strategic and competitive analysis on-the-fly gives the company a competitive edge that results in increased market share, revenue and profit.

This is the most effective way to increase the return on the BI investment, normally so difficult to justify when BI supports just back office functions and not strategic and profitable growth.

Regards, Bill

The trends that I keep seeing from a general industry perspective are cloud computing and mobile. But in terms of what I am seeing among my readers and clients are companies looking for ways to optimize their current BI environments through the use of data visualization and more advanced analytics, as well as companies moving towards operational BI as the next step in their use of business intelligence.

I see Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics merging into "Business Analytics".

The primary trends in business analytics diverge depending on the perspective.

From the vendors perspective, all we need is pivoting and charting past data and more of it.

From the business perspective what we need is an answer to the question: "Ok, I know what happened - what do I do next, without having to ask three other people up and down the organization?"

BI has been placed on the back burner due to revenue reductions. BI should have been placed ahead of other systems because of the inherent decision support, forecasting, trending, analysis of customer needs, material forecasts and more. Not having BI leaves an organization without a consolidated 360 view.

The biggest trend is the move from large time consuming and costly implementations to smaller more agile and simple to use tools that can be implemented in weeks or months instead of many months or years.

We are also seeing BI in more places, such as in the CRM system, the e-Commerce system (predictive selling) and the call center. The line between absolute BI and other mission critical applications is blurred.

1. Predictive Analysis - Predictive BI tools that uncover hidden trends to forecast 'what would happen'

2. SaaS-based BI tools

3. Open source BI solutions

4. More efficient and open source data visualizaton tools

Here are a few trends as I see them.

1. There is a trend for large software vendors to have a full suite of products to tie the customer up.
2. There are some smaller new BI solution providers that have great ability and industry expertise at a fraction of the cost of the large players.
3. The Cloud and SaaS will become more and more accepted.
4. More industries are understanding the importance of gaining competitive value out of their data but they are still studying how to do that. The speed of this will ramp up over the next couple years.
5. BI other than traditional operational types of reports is still a "want or nice to have someday" in many industries but not taking precedence over what is absolutely needed today to do the job at the moment.
6.Business is changing so fast that agility needs to be built into any BI solution which is frustrating the business side and providing angst on the IT side. The sides will move closer together.

I am sure there are more but these are a few.

Analytics (BI) can once again become the streaming predictive enterprise planning & modeling tools for everything from materials to cash management. BI assists, if all KPIs are properly integrated, in evaluation of business effectiveness and cost compliance.

Most data are already in place, connecting the dots and allowing those in decision-maker positions to more readily utilize that value in their organizations.

Adoption and implementation are the keys.

I do want some analysis pointed to these trends in BI before join BI/SaaS enthusiasts. Have you got some or this opinion is only yours?