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 3: User-Centric BI 

  Trend 3: User-Centric BI

  Since the last time the economy took a nosedive in 2001, Nagappan has shifted his department’s focus to better customize the information he delivers to different user segments based on their roles within the organization.

  “We have noticed that our customer segments—we call them personas—that use our platform are all different,” Nagappan says, explaining that personas can range from financial reps to marketing and sales folks to business advisers. “The key thing we recognized was that one size was not going to fit them all.”

  As he helps the businesses come out the other end of the recession on a strong note, Nagappan’s top priorities include a shift to offering user-centric analytics based on role.

  “We need to take the same data and create analytical models that satisfy the various personas that are going to look at the information so they have better decision-making ability from it,” he says. “We take the same transactional data and create various functional areas so these different consumers can come and take what they need.”

  According to Burton Group’s Bugajski, it is this kind of user-centric focus that more BI departments must develop to enable the business to drive true value from the information it is analyzing. He says the typical organization too often faces the prospect of gathering BI information from what he calls the “human GUIs” of the enterprise: users who know how to extract data and end up interfacing with BI systems for colleagues who either don’t know how or don’t want to learn.

  “There’s value there,” Bugajski says. “There are reasonable and responsible behaviors there. But that’s not the original vision for BI.

  “Where is the tooling that my CEO could use? Where is the tooling that my business analysts who are not experts in data, but who are experts in marketing, could use? Where is that stuff? They want something that is as simple to use as a Google search. And that’s fair to ask.”

  Next: Trend 4: Visualization Improvements >>