Top 6 Business Intelligence Trends For 2020
This last decade has been the one where people realised the real value of data. It is where data went ‘Big’ so much that in the last 2 years, we have generated 90% of all the data that we see today.
The following estimates and trends suggest this is just the beginning:
- Adoption of mobile devices across all strata and release of data in the forms of images, videos and social media interactions
- With the growing usage of sensors & surveillance devices, it is going to expand even more. As per IDC estimates, 41.6 billion connected IoT devices will exist and would generate 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data by 2025
- Digitization of all forms of data, earlier it was in other physical formats and adoption of cloud platform
It has been the decade that brought about significant changes across business processes. Now, stakeholders across each function like to do a fact check before making a big decision. That is where they rely on Business Intelligence (BI) or Analytics platforms to do the number crunching for them.
Keeping things into perspective — earlier, they had to rely on an MIS team or an analyst for this fact-checking exercise now, we can say that — BI and analytics platforms have truly been democratized.
Now the question for the next decade is — With the wave of digital transformation catching up, how BI & analytics will transform? What can we expect more from BI platforms in 2020?
To understand this, the Business Application Research Centre conducted a survey of nearly 2,900 BI experts (users, consultants and vendors) for their views on the most important BI trends and this is what they found:
Source: Business Application Research Centre
We launched a Twitter chat to gauge the opinions of the experts in the analytics industry, you can access the thread here or you can follow #BITrends to follow and engage in our chat:
Q1. What business intelligence trend are you most excited about? #BItrends @chidambara09 @BillNigh
The study is indicative of the fact that the majority of analysts and BI users want a more qualitative and collaborative analytics culture. In line with this thought, now we are going to present our pick of ‘Top 6 BI Trends for 2020.’
Trend #1. Augmented Analytics:
The first trend that we are going to talk about is a combination of Human capabilities with machine intelligence — Augmented Analytics. This is going to drive the analytics space in the years to come. People have started realising the power technology as ML, NLP & AI brings to the table and as per IDC’s Worldwide semi-annual Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide, the world spending on AI systems will double the current spending to climb up to $77.6 billion by 2022.
Even though, there is some scepticism that surrounds AI implementations, with the deluge of data that the organisations are subjected to — they are going to need technologies like machine learning and AI to expedite the process of uncovering key trends and generating predictions.
But this is not all, at least for now organisations need human intellect to put these insights into practical use. That is why an augmented approach is needed.
Augmented analytics promises to deliver on some significant challenges that companies face today, primarily — ‘User Adoption’. With augmented analytics business users can find actionable insights in a fraction of the time it earlier used to take, with little dependence on business analysts or data scientists. This is going to provide a big boost to the usability & friendliness of BI & Analytics platforms amongst users of all departments and impact the ROI of these investments.
Trend #2. Plug n’ Play Analytics Solutions:
With everything around us speeding up, it is very natural for organisations to adapt to a pre-loaded analytics solution that caters to the need of one or more departments. Analytics project implementation takes a humongous amount of due diligence in terms of scheduling downtimes of existing systems to form a cadre to rolling it out in phases. It’s hard to get it right in one go, that’s why companies invest a considerable amount of time while formulating the right analytics strategy.
A pre-packaged application that is tried & tested and guarantees the desired outcome without all the hassles & uncertainty, holds great value for agile organisations of today.
A fast-growing start-up wanted a constant check on its financials and chose to provide its department heads with a birds-eye-view of their performance but, they neither wanted to invest a lot of time nor capital in an analytics system. They procured CFO Cockpit — our ready-to-use analytics solution that served all their needs without any worries of procurement or maintenance.
