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.

Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published yesterday a post entitled Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts, where Julie B. Hunt, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and I share our thoughts on BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012.


Thank you so much to the people of Spotfire's blog for the invitation to share my thoughts on the subject.

Top 10 Business Intelligence Posts of 2011 from Spotfire’s Blog

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published before yesterday a post with the Top 10 Business Intelligence Posts of 2011 from Spotfire’s Blog, and to my surprise, 2 guest blog posts written by me are in the list:
- 7 Business Intelligence Predictions for 2011, published in January, 2011
- 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update), published in April, 2011.


Thank you so much to the people of Spotfire's blog for the invitation to write guest posts. I am truly grateful.

Happy New Year!

2 More Hot Trends in Business Intelligence

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published today the Part Two of the update of the post 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence, written by me 6 months ago, entitled 2 More Hot Trends in Business Intelligence. The Part One 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update), was published last week.


Earlier this year, I also published a post on their blog with Business Intelligence Predictions for 2011.

Thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the invitation to write guest posts. I am truly grateful.

7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update)

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published today a guest blog post written by me, entitled 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update). This post is an update of a post written 6 months ago.

Once again, thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the opportunity.

11 Guiding Principles for a Successful Business Intelligence Implementation

Tibco Spotfire has one of the most prolific corporate blog in the BI area. Updated nearly every day, the blog, entitled Trends and Outliers, is a great source of news and information about Business Intelligence (Full disclosure: I already wrote guest posts for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog). Last week, they published a great post on Successful BI Implementation, where they listed 11 guiding principles for a successful business intelligence implementation from Booz & Co. Below is the list:


1. Drive Change From The Top Down and The Bottom Up
Like any new solution, business intelligence is only effective if people use it. For it to be completely adopted, it needs to be used not only by line managers but also by executives.

2. Create a Comprehensive Definition of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence puts emphasis on measuring performance against goals and establishing accountability for reaching those goals. Make sure you have the supporting processes, systems and change management protocols in place to support this new way of running the business.

3. Use an Agile, Modular Approach
You can achieve more flexible and more effective implementations of business intelligence faster with agile development and by focusing on specific areas that are guided by an integrated, overall strategy.

4. Focus On The Right Metrics
Metrics must be aligned with the company’s strategy and capabilities, including both internal and external inputs, and consisting of both leading and lagging indicators.

5. Keep It Simple
Even though technology might let you drill down 16 levels into the data or slice and dice it 100 different ways, that kind of analysis may be irrelevant and distracting. Be selective by including a few key metrics that are the most important and drill down to the top three or four levels.

6. Build a Unified BI System
Some of the most important insight from a BI system can come from discovering how interdependencies impact outcomes across an organization. Integrate data and data analytics across the organization to allow for custom analytics that can identify root causes of issues.

7. Launch Early
To gain acceptance and support you may need some early wins with a BI project. Start with high-priority areas that have high-quality metrics. Demonstrate the value of a BI solution to help build momentum for the project.

8. Create Detailed System Requirements and Select The Right Partners
Successful BI implementations require a partnership between IT and the lines of business. They also require strong project management skills, systems integration know-how and software tools. Make sure you’ve included and selected the right teams across all these areas.

9. Leverage Existing Infrastructure
Business Intelligence implementations should align with a company’s IT strategy and vision for how IT will support the business. BI should complement existing IT capability which can often be achieved by leveraging current IT infrastructure to provide the back end, and using business intelligence solutions to provide the front end.

10. Establish a Centralized Governance Structure
A business intelligence implementation can touch every area of an enterprise. It requires cooperation and shared ownership from the business and IT, new data management protocols, strong project management and ongoing analysis of the metrics used. For maximum success, you should create an overall governance structure led by the business and supported by IT.

11. Proactively Manage Change
Introducing business intelligence requires extensive change management. When evaluating performance against metrics, there should be clear accountability, consequences for not meeting goals and incentives for exceeding them. As with any initiative that requires change management, a successful BI implementation requires senior leadership support, training and communication throughout the enterprise.

Business Intelligence Predictions for 2011

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published today a guest blog post written by me, with the Business Intelligence Predictions for 2011.

The post was also published on the site Smart Data Collective. Thanks to the staff of Spotfire blog for the opportunity.

7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence

I was invited to write a guest blog post for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog. TIBCO Spotfire is a leader in the data visualization space. Today they published the post, entitled 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence. Thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the invitation.

Tibco announces Tibco Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based BI/analytics

Tibco announced today Tibco Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based BI/analytics. According the press release: "Tibco Silver Spotfire is a fully functional on-demand offering designed to enable anyone to create, publish and share custom dashboards or reports for business analytics and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud. TIBCO Silver Spotfire is more than traditional BI in a SaaS offering; it is essentially a “social BI” offering that enables business teams to easily build and share reports, dashboards, charts, and other visualization and calculations in order to grow a corporate analytics knowledge base. TIBCO Silver Spotfire can be integrated with social media, allowing users to embed live dashboards into their business blogs and online articles, thereby distributing their analytic knowledge base more broadly than is possible with traditional BI tools. "

The good news is: You can use one-year free trial, with no cost or obligation. That is an interesting initiative by Tibco.


I read several comments on blogs and on Twitter about the Tibco's announcement, I would like to highlight:

Sandy Kemsley commented in her blog:"This shouldn’t be a huge surprise to those watching TIBCO announcements to date: at their conference in May, “Silver Analytics” was mentioned in the general session as an upcoming product release, and they’ve made much ado about moving all of their other products onto the Silver cloud platform that this seems inevitable."

Merv Adrian commented in his blog: "Spotfire has had a “visionary” reputation for some time now (Gartner has recognized it as such in Magic Quadrant research), and Tibco has steadily grown its market share, though like other portfolio software vendors, it is unwilling to break individual product numbers out for a clear comparison. Its strong visualization, powerful statistical engine, and in-memory performance focus (with load balancing in the server in its latest release) have extended its reputation. Spotfire also leverages Tibco’s long experience with event processing to provide context-aware features that have driven continued expansion. Silver Spotfire confirms its preference for the visionary play with an authoring client, andweb-based sharing and hosting that will be available for a monthly fee after the trial."


You can register for use the free software trial through the Tibco Silver Spotfire website.