As we stand in the last quarter of 2015, it is time to stock of the changes and disruptions which have taken place in the last one year and what would be the new trends shaping up in 2016.
For business, which in today’s world highly dependent on data and technology to drive their decision making process, it is necessary to be prepared upfront on what they could expect to face 2016. On the other side for the technology companies and in specific BI vendors, it is very important that they orient their strategies and products to the changing needs of time in order to be alive and kicking in the business.
In this post we would be discussing on the trends which would key drivers for the BI world for 2016. Please note that the pointers listed below are not sorted in any particular order or importance.
- Governed Self Service:
After a long period of governed BI when the control remained in the hands of IT followed by a solo run by pure self-service BI, it is time that both these schools of thought get integrated. While governed BI made business heavily dependent on IT for any decision making process, relaxing the entire control into the hand of business through complete self-service resulted in redundant information silos with no single version of truth.Hence now it is time that customers demand and have both at the same time. So they would want to enable business with the maximum amount of self service capabilities but at the same keep the IT governance in place. This is to ensure that BI system remains true and relevant as the organization grows.
- Big Data
In 2016 Big Data would not be that ‘holy term’ which every BI professional had heard of but did not had any clue what it would mean to them. Organizations are continuing their gradual venture into the Big Data space building infrastructure and are making attempts to leverage this vast amount of data for storage and analytic.System integrators would observe more of their customers adding Big Data as an additional source to their existing Enterprise Data Warehouse. BI vendors would continue to build their capabilities aligned to the Big Data ecosystem in terms accessibility and processing abilities.
- Internet of Things
IoT would occupy the space which Big Data had been in that past couple of years. IoT is re-shaping the way we can use and interact the multitude of devices around us. As IoT expands we would have data flowing in from an infinite number of devices which we use in our day to day life. And BI would as usual have a pivotal role to play in analysing the data and present it in a way which can drive decision making process.
- Expanding connectivity to new data sources and faster processing of large volume of data
We are past those days when Enterprise Data Warehouse would be the only source of data to drive the decision making process. With the advent of social media and all the unstructured data getting created, business would want to expand their scope of analysis. For example along with sales they would also want to have a look at customer behaviour before actually forecasting. Thus it would be necessary for BI platforms to connect to more and more data sources, mostly unstructured, and be able to analyse. But again al that analysis should happen at run time and fast so that users don’t have to wait for the data being cleaned, transformed and aggregated in some tables before being accessed; all the computations should happen on the fly. BI tools with in memory capabilities to compute just massive datasets would stand to benefit.
- Cloud
In 2016 we can expect any new business embarking on the BI journey to prefer Cloud over On-Premise. And existing business houses would try to offload their existing set-up mostly on the visualization side to cloud. This would mostly be driven by factors like improved security and high availability assured by cloud infrastructure providers like AWS. With robust cloud being made available, customers are feeling more and more confident in moving towards cloud thus achieving cost reductions.
- Mobile
Mobility would continue to be the focus area as the entire world is mostly shifting from traditional desktop and laptops to devices like tablets, smart phones etc. Business has now understood that BI should not only be restricted to the top management and business analysts. Junior and middle management users who on a daily basis drive the business by being on the roam and taking small but important decisions should also be provided access to the enterprise BI. Since this new genre of users would not be the ones doing a desk job it would be necessary to make any and all BI application mobile enabled. Offline capability and ability to perform analysis (not just view information) from mobile devices should be focus areas from BI vendors to enhance their existing mobility capabilities
- Advanced Analytic
Going forward business users are not expected to be just satisfied with normal graphs and grids while looking for insights into their data. There would be increasing demand for integration with complex algorithms which can help them perform advanced analytic and predict how business would need to change and adapt. As business around the globe continue to re-invent themselves with the application of new technologies, it would be challenging and exciting times ahead for the system integrators and BI vendors ahead.