Paper Lists Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends
By Cheryl Knight, contributing writer
A recent Tableau Software white paper, titled “Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence for 2014,” assesses the effects of these trends on how companies handle their information.
Business Intelligence In The Cloud
Moving a company’s business intelligence (BI), such as sales, marketing, and financial data, to the cloud has become a more viable and desired option. The reasons for this are faster deployment times, easier collaboration with customers and business partners, and the ability to determine how many IT resources companies have to devote toward any particular solution. In addition, cloud data warehouses make the process of building a data warehouse faster. With the ability to conduct a trial easier than ever, companies can try cloud-based business analytics before making a decision.
Everyone Is A Data Scientist
Instead of a data analysis as a specific job description, business people with a variety of titles are using data. These users are expecting usability from their dashboards and solutions that work with new data sources. The white paper cites the GigaOm white paper “Agile business intelligence: reshaping the landscape” as a resource for more information.
Tableau Software also says storytelling is becoming a priority — to help people draw meaning from large amounts of otherwise disparate data. Mobile BI is also a growing demand as people begin to use data in the course of their workdays.
The paper also says a trend is for businesses to explore how to use unstructured data. NoSQL, which provides a simpler design, finer control over the availability of data, and more horizontal scaling over the more traditional Hadoop model, is becoming more popular. Tableau Software cites a Tech Republic article, “10 Things You Should Know About noSQL databases” for more information.
Looking Forward
Additional trends are predictive analytics — using data to be proactive — and embedding BI in customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other business tools so information is readily available for decision making. Tableau Software says businesses are also taking a serious look at social data for insights into their relationships with customers.