Published on the 18/03/2013 | Written by Daniel Yuen

Every business is looking at how to make better use of the data it has and to make sense out of all the small details. As 2013 gets well underway, Gartner analyst Daniel Yuen outlines a number of BI trends that will shape the strategies and tactics that organisations will need to consider over the next four years…

The success of business intelligence and analytics implementation in an organisation is always measured by the level of user acceptance, how pervasive BI is in the organisation and how well the solution improves decision making.

Mobile use may now be the most significant consumer technology when it comes to improving BI adoption. Although mobility enables BI to attract users and reach new constituencies in an organisation, ease of use and an engaging experience are the critical success factors for determining implementation success.

A broadened information base always generates more insight for better decision making. In the operational environment, a dashboard for lines of business, with multiple data sources from relevant systems, will enhance the situational awareness of decision makers and lead to better operational decision making.

Here are three of Gartner’s top predictions for business intelligence and analytics covering trends that we believe will help organisations that want to become more competitive in 2013 and beyond.

1) By 2015, over 50 percent of mobile BI users will rely exclusively on mobile devices for insight delivery, and will grow BI users by 20 percent.

Top managers in many organisations are enthusiastically adopting mobile BI. It is often their first direct interaction with the organisation’s BI tools. Early encouraging results show that there is enough traction to gradually replace the spreadsheets, presentations and mail used as sources for business insights.

However, the real force fostering this adoption is not mobility itself. The enthusiasm mainly derives from the ease of use, engaging user experience, convenience and fast access to relevant and timely business information — the same attributes we expect from any consumer-grade application delivering news or sports scores on a tablet or smartphone.

It is a major breakthrough and a perfect example of the consumerisation of IT — we have gone from feature bloat to streamlined mobile apps; from ‘nice to have’ information to relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that fit inside devices’ small screens; from yesterday’s or last month’s data to current business status.

2) By 2016, 70 percent of leading BI vendors will have incorporated naturallanguage and spoken-word capabilities.

BI/analytics vendors continue to be slow in providing language- and voice-enabled applications. In their rush to port their applications to mobile and tablet devices, BI vendors have tended to focus only on adapting their traditional BI point-and-click and drag-and-drop user interfaces to touch-based interfaces.

In doing so, they have vastly, and surprisingly, ignored the opportunity to provide users with the ability to issue spoken queries or receive spoken responses.

The general mobile market, however, is rapidly developing and promoting personal virtual assistants. These products are generally designed to simplify the operation of applications on the smartphone, or connect to unstructured data.

3) By 2016, more than half of real-time business dashboards will provide a panoramic view that pulls information from multiple sources.

Most real-time dashboards that are used to monitor business operations provide only a narrow keyhole view of situations. The visibility that they offer is limited to one application system or a single operational activity. For example, they may display one or a few KPIs from a system that processes mortgage applications, or they may show metrics based on the volume of customer and prospect activity on the company’s website, but not both.

However, the situation awareness of decision makers can be greatly enhanced when different kinds of related event data from multiple sources are mashed up and incorporated into the dashboard, to provide a ‘panoramic’ view of multiple aspects of the operation.

Secondary sources of event data can include other application systems, other departments within the company, business partners, news feeds, industry data feeds, weather feeds, traffic feeds, Twitter, other social applications and other sources.

People can make better decisions and anticipate problems sooner if they are aware of relevant events that occur outside the scope of their local application or operation. For example, a keyhole real-time dashboard might inform a product manager that sales orders were 40 percent below normal in the morning. In contrast, a panoramic dashboard could supplement that KPI by showing other relevant facts, such as a notification that the corporate website had experienced an outage, or a competitor had dropped its prices.

Understand the trends to differentiate
Business intelligence and analytics leaders are looking for ways to improve the pervasiveness of BI. Gartner predicts the use of mobile devices and apps will improve BI delivery; the adoption of spoken-word capabilities will greatly simplify the operation of the application on mobile devices; and multiple data sources in business dashboards will improve situational awareness. Organisations can take advantage of these trends to help differentiate their business and become more competitive.

ABOUT DANIEL YUEN//

Daniel Yuen is research director for business intelligence, analytics and performance management at research firm Gartner. www.gartner.com