Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends 2015

2014 was another excellent year for business intelligence with further growth posted and continuing the seemingly constant cycle of growth that has been the hallmark of the BI industry over the last decade. An after-effect of this substantial growth is the constant evolution and change that takes place within the industry. Being the helpful bunch that we are at Connexica, we have compiled a list of our predictions to keep you all up to date with the top trends during 2015.

To that end, here are our top 10 business intelligence trends for 2015…

1. Non-technical users become self-sufficient

Gone are the days when the IT department were the analytics middlemen. Nowadays, new technologies exist streamlining the process and improving efficiency across the organisation. During 2014 a research report published by Gartner stated that many organisations appear to be moving away from the traditional BI infrastructure where IT owns report production and have heavy input into the administration of the system. Instead organisations are moving to a self-service model, where report production is in the hands of those who originally need it – freeing IT to focus their efforts elsewhere.

2. Greater flexibility in report-design

A common criticism of traditional report design is that users are limited in the reporting outputs they can realistically achieve. This constraint often leaves the user feeling unsatisfied and less motivated with their job, potentially hampering their performance. Addressing this issue is key in 2015 and we expect a massive push from the industry, placing significant focus on making the report building process more flexible to ensure that genuine user-generated report outputs are achieved.

You can read about how we are focusing in this area with our launch of new CXAIR functionality Pages.

3. Conversations about data become practical

Humans crave and thrive on social interaction. Over the years we’ve seen the birth and tremendous growth of our social networks that have revolutionised the way we interact with each other. Now this new way of interaction is crossing over into the analytics space. We predict that with the presence of new technologies, 2015 will see a rising trend in the number of organisations that prioritise analytics solutions that provide their teams with an effective means to collaborate in order to better understand and explain data and discover trends.

4. Social Intelligence becomes useable intelligence

It is hard to measure how much data there is in existence because it is so rapidly growing. In fact, some experts say that about 90% of all the data in the world today has been generated over the past few years. With the big boom of data that the era of social media has brought upon us organisations’ key analytics requirements have shifted in order to capture and draw insight from the data produced via social networks. We expect buying organisations to look for a solution that can index unstructured data and convert it into meaningful insight in 2015.

5. Data silos made redundant

Data silos were originally born out of convenience. Organisations were producing all of this “excess” data that at the time they couldn’t do much with without significant investment, the easy option being to use data silos as storage. The liberation of this data is now of key importance to buying organisations to create a data environment where all data can be exchanged with other systems in the organisation in a single scalable interface.

6. Analysing unstructured data becomes standard

Over 80% of organisational data is unstructured, placing emphasis on the importance of unlocking this data. Traditionally organisations have relied on their structured data to gain insights as previous experience into harnessing unstructured data has proven unsuccessful. Innovations in Business Intelligence over recent years now provide organisations with the opportunity to utilise their unstructured data to gain greater insight. We expect to see a continued focus in this area in 2015 from both the industry and buying organisations.

7. Analytics for everyone within the organisation

A combination of the increased amount of data organisations generate and the rising demand for self-service analytics has resulted in not only the necessity for analytics across the organisation but also the capability to implement and maintain it successfully. As data has grown, organisations are finding numerous benefits in implementing business intelligence across their various departments -both customer and back-office facing.

8. Mobile BI becomes the norm

When mobile Business Intelligence first launched it was immediately hyped to become the next big thing. Initially however, uptake was slow and hesitant due to technology deficiencies and a resistance to culture change amongst organisations. However, the last few years have seen mobile Business Intelligence enjoy a period of sustained growth as more organisations are becoming more comfortable with the concept and are seeing the benefits. We predict that mobile Business Intelligence will continue its growth and become a top priority for buyers and come to be almost mainstream during 2015.

9. Moving away from in-memory technology

2015 is the year when in-memory technology becomes redundant. No longer will solutions harnessing in-memory technology be considered a viable, cost-effective or efficient means of coping with the constantly growing data demands of a modern day business. We predict that organisations will seek alternative technologies such as search-engine technology in order to find a solution that provides cost-effective scalability and performance enhancement.

10. System Integration

Near seamless integration with other tools will become the industry standard. Since the turn of this century we’ve seen exponential growth in the uptake of software systems by organisations looking to increase performance and efficiency. This has brought with it the unfortunate consequence of a large ecosystem of applications that are unable to connect and interact with each other. In 2015, we expect analytics systems that can be integrated as part of a wider application eco-system, to be a top priority for buying organisations.

We’re looking forward to see how many of these we get right by the end of the year, though make sure you take each with a pinch of salt!… I’m not particularly partial to humble pie.

Here’s to a great 2015!