TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Five Trends Changing the Face of BI

Ericka Chickowski | Date: 08-20-09 | Comments

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• Predictive analytics, agile development, user-centric business intelligence and improvements in visualization are giving new life to this mature technology.
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  Table of Contents:

  Five Trends Changing the Face of BI Trend 1: Predictive Analytics Trend 2: Agile Development Trend 3: User-Centric BI Trend 4: Visualization Improvements Trend 5: Operationalization of IT

• Five Trends Changing the Face of BI - Trend 1: Predictive Analytics 

  Trend 1: Predictive Analytics

  If Ram Nagappan had to name one critical area where he thinks business intelligence has the most potential to completely transform his enterprise, predictive analytics would get the nod.

  “If you look at it, everyone supplies records, everyone has dashboards—or they're planning on doing it,” says Nagappan, managing director for Pershing LLC, a Jersey City, N.J.-based financial services affiliate of The Bank of New York Mellon. “But in these economic times, the information that I know beforehand is what will help me save money and steer the ship in the right direction.”

  As he puts it, the BI industry is just “scratching the surface” of predictive analytics. This is partially because analytics in general has lagged so far behind the rest of the more traditional reporting functions of BI.

  “Analytics has been the last to the party in the BI space,” Burton Group’s Bugajski says. “All the easy stuff has been done. We can make very pretty charts and graphs, but it's not the [same as an] interaction with the core information of the business so I can understand what’s going on. That’s still missing.”

  Right now, most organizations are pushing the boundaries of current tool set capabilities. “What we’re seeing are mostly in the research and university areas,” Pershing’s Nagappan says of current predictive analytic tool development. “I know that people can take their current analytical data models and other things that they’ve created and do a prediction on them, but the tools are not quite there yet.”

  Clearly, Nagappan’s expectation for better tools tracks well with recent rumblings in the business intelligence marketplace. According to IDC, the analytics market is expected to grow about 4 percent this year.

  In late July, IBM banked more than $1.2 billion on a bet that predictive analytics is the key to BI’s future. The investment was made in the acquisition of SPSS, an analytics firm well-known for its predictive analytics technology.

  “With this acquisition, we are extending our capabilities around a new level of analytics that provides clients not only with greater insight, but also with true foresight,” Ambuj Goyal, general manager of information management for IBM, said in a statement about the acquisition. “Predictive analytics can help clients move beyond the ‘sense and respond’ mode—which can leave blind spots for strategic information in today's fast-paced environment—to ‘predict and act’ for improved business outcomes.”

  While organizations wait for the market to shake out, Pershing’s Nagappan believes that those who prepare their subject-matter experts will be best prepared to take advantage of new technology innovations. “I think the challenge in predictive analytics is going to be building the subject-matter expertise within the analysts,” he says. “In order to predict systematically an analyst needs to know the subject matter well.”

  Next: Trend 2: Agile Development >>