We’re pleased to share this blog published by our Business Intelligence partner TARGIT.
Drawing from its expertise in industries across food and beverage, heavy machinery, retail and more, the self-service BI company identified key IT trends for the year ahead.
TARGIT identified trends such as self-service BI will be a driving force behind how savvy IT departments and businesses will find success in 2016. Aided by systems such as data governance and bimodal BI, self-service BI allows IT to empower business users to create and discover insights with data, without sacrificing the greater big data analytics structures that help shape a data-driven organisation.
“Around this time every year, our team takes a look at how far the business intelligence and analytics industry has come in the past 12 months and how well TARGIT has done in predicting, keeping up with, and in many cases, surpassing evolving industry trends and standards,” said Ulrik Pederson, CTO of TARGIT. “We predicted 2015 would see an increase in data governance, a rise in embedded BI, simplified data visualisations, and increased data experimentation. And if the popularity of our Decision Suite 2015—a tool that encompasses these trends— in the market is telling, we’re on track to be on the right side of predictions again.”
1. Self-service big data discovery takes the front seat
Historically, self-service data discovery and big data analyses were two separate capabilities of business intelligence; but business will soon see an increased shift in the blending of these two worlds. There will be an expansion of big data analytics with tools that make it possible for business users to perform comprehensive self-service exploration with big data when they need it, without major hand-holding from IT.
2. Bimodal BI goes big
As trends such as big data discovery spread, companies must properly manage the massive amounts of data available, including unstructured, semi-structured and incomplete data. In response, there will be an increase in what some analysts refers to as “bimodal BI,” which tackles both the necessity of agile, user-friendly analytics and the reliability and security of data. The bimodal business intelligence strategies that thrive in the coming year will be designed with flexibility and mass distribution in mind.
3. Explosion in advanced analytics projects
As self-service BI proliferates, the New Year will also bring a huge increase in advanced analytics projects across industries. However, many companies will face challenges as they take on projects involving big data. Organisations will have to work diligently to successfully implement these projects.
4. Smarter thinking about data inclusion
Many early adopters of big data analytics struggled with analyzing too much, which resulted in small amounts of information about many different areas, and an incomplete picture of the business overall. As analytics becomes more accessible to business users, there will be a shift toward more focused and realistic big data discovery projects, which will in turn provide valuable data for business decisions.
5. Data governance gets another gold star
The traditional way of handling data governance—centralised, strict, and secure—is still valid for enterprise multidimensional data warehouses. But it is inefficient, riddled with unavoidable bottlenecks, and stymies experimentation. In order to promote innovation and experimentation among teams, a decentralised data governance strategy is necessary for any type of ad-hoc data discovery. Therefore, in 2016, BI platforms must establish various levels of permissions and settings to ensure high data quality is delivered to the right people, at the right time.
6. Sandbox analytics strategies get to sit at the big kids table
Data governance should solve the double-pronged need for data experimentation in a secure environment. But data experimentation isn’t right for everyone. Not all data—no matter how potentially useful—should immediately be shared across the company until the right experimentation, finessing, and cleansing for quality has been performed. In response, “sandbox analytics” will result in the creation of small, isolated groups of BI users to produce, experiment with, and share data before considering wider adoption across the company.
In 2016, savvy businesses will convert the self-service BI trend into an opportunity to empower employees with data-driven thinking. By leveraging systems such as data governance and bimodal BI alongside self-service BI and partnering with leading providers like TARGIT, business will be well positioned for success in the year ahead.
For more information on TARGIT, please visit their website and contact Prodware for further assistance on integrating BI and reporting tools with Microsoft Dynamics. To read the blog on the TARGIT website, please click here.
Leave a reply