Top Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence in 2012

The Business Intelligence scenario has evolved greatly in recent times, with new trends, approaches, concepts and tools. Early this month, I already shared my thoughts for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, in a post entitled Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts, where Julie B. Hunt, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and I talked about the BI Resolution for Companies and the Top 3 Trends for Industry. It's worth reading.

Here are my BI Resolution and a more comprehensive list of the top trends, that in my opinion, will impact Business Intelligence in 2012:

BI Resolution for Companies

Take advantage of the emerging BI trends to make organizations actually become a democracy of information, with business intelligence being used for everyone, anywhere, anytime.

Top Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence in 2012

Mobile BI – The proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise, and the need to make decisions anywhere/anytime accessing real-time analytics make mobile BI remain a hot topic. There are several companies that specialize in developing mobile BI applications and most BI vendors also have developed a mobile version. Howard Dresner, who recently published the latest version of the Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study, considers that mobile BI becomes fundamentally the new platform for business intelligence.

Cloud BI – The cloud-based BI will boost the use of BI. The cloud model allows the companies to save money, with faster implementation without substantial investments. It is also ease of use. Although there are many concerns about implementing BI on the cloud (mainly security), the vendors and the market as a whole have matured. It is important to remember that it’s necessary to have a well-defined data integration strategy to implement a successful cloud-based BI.

Big Data – The amount of data in our world has been growing exponentially, and the uses of big data in the BI scenario will allow companies to put data to work more efficiently. They could really turn into data-driven enterprises.

Self-Service BI - With BI tools even easier to use, and the results easy to consume, enabling more flexibility and analytics capabilities to nontechnical users, the business users are less dependent on the IT.

In-Memory Analytics - The growing need of companies for high-performance analytics applications, with the ability to provide high speed of access in a big amount of data, make the interest in In-Memory Analytics platforms increases more and more.

Open Source BI - The Open-source BI has evolved significantly with more complete and sofisticated tools. They are being implemented by large, medium and small companies, moving toward mainstream.

Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis - The growing use of social media for the companies (several companies have Twitter account and Facebook page) along with the need of collect and analyze many kinds of unstructured data are becoming the text analytics and sentiment analysis increasingly important.

Collaborative BI - BI tools with embedded collaboration capabilities allow BI users to share information and work together more easily and efficiently. People like and are familiar with the use of social media tools, thus facilitating the widespread use of Social and Collaborative BI.

Self-Service BI: Empowering the Line-of-Business Manager

In the recent released report, entitled Self-Service BI: Empowering the Line-of-Business Manager, written by Michael Lock, Aberdeen Group found that top performers were able to drive higher adoption of their BI tools by eliminating or reducing IT involvement, and developing their top managers into analytically inclined decision makers. This report is based on direct feedback from 223 executives across the globe.

According the executive summary: "Today's Line-of-Business (LoB) managers need to make quicker decisions based on cleaner and more relevant information. Waiting for a report to make its way through an IT queue is no longer an option as timely decisions carry a higher business premium than ever before. LoB decision makers now require self-service access to their analytical solutions in order to stay abreast of market trends and react quicker to threats and opportunities. Aberdeen's research shows that Best-in-Class companies have a comprehensive strategy to develop their non-technical LoB managers into analytically inclined decision makers, spread business intelligence (BI) capability to more organizational functions, and drive significant internal and external business efficiencies as a result."

"Through training programs and leveraging cross-functional input from multiple lines-of-business, leading companies are able to create their own breed of 'power user'. This type of user is not an IT expert, a software developer, or a database administrator. The power user has the ability to create their own functional specific views and reports, can do ad-hoc discovery on their own data, and can generate self-service business insight from the tools at their disposal", wrote Lock.

You can obtain a complimentary copy of the report in the Aberdeen Group website. This Benchmark report is provided free for a limited time by its sponsors Noetix and SAP.

Increasingly there are companies intending to reduce or eliminate IT involvement in creating analytic applications, and vendors are offering a path around IT, mainly through Web 2.0-Oriented BI Tools, enabling business users to create their own BI applications.