While many businesses are still reeling from the events of the past two years, some are managing to meet and outperform expectations. Irrespective of where the company falls along this continuum, one of the key technology enablers helping companies steadily navigate this unexpected change and ensure business continuity is business intelligence (BI).
That's why we've put together a list of the top 7 BI trends we think can help enterprises grow their organizational business analytics program in 2022.
The digital revolution of 2020 and 2021 is here to stay. By moving data to the cloud, companies have enhanced access to data to maintain collaboration and productivity amidst a distributed workforce. In order to garner actionable, timely insights from that data, companies are harnessing the power of cloud analytics. Today, depending on the budget, security and compliance, hardware, and other factors, analytics can be flexibly deployed on public, private, hybrid, multi, or community clouds, or also as microservices. This will further propel the adoption of cloud analytics.
The ingenious unification of the BI stack has transformed reporting/visualization applications into modern BI and analytics platforms. Some of the hottest additions and consolidations are happening in the data preparation layer. This helps enterprises connect, explore, transform, and enrich their data for analysis. This list of additions is becoming a native part of the BI workflow, which includes data integration, preparation, management, and insights.
Yet another layer, perhaps the most popular, that has recently joined the BI full-stack approach is AI/ML, which will redefine self-service analytics and make the intelligence program widely accessible within enterprises. Add automation capabilities to this mix and organizations will find themselves with a complete, powerful BI program that can run on auto-pilot and empower teams to quickly make data-driven decisions.
The rapid adoption of technologies and applications is creating multiple points of consumption for analytics. For instance, the evolution of natural language query(NLQ) capabilities into immersive conversations has driven up the adoption of BI among business users; and delivering in-context analytics is eventually emerging as a vital functionality for BI vendors. To address this, analytics platforms now embed AI and ML capabilities across multiple points in any business workflow for contextual insight discovery.
Decision intelligence is also gaining momentum in the business world. This strengthens the framework for decision-making best practices, which aids the application of machine learning at scale. These act as enablers that complement decisions made by humans. One such enabler is automated insights. It tops up visualizations with insights in the form of narratives, giving more firepower for better decisions.
With the adoption of more business apps across companies, BI platforms are becoming more data agnostic, and are expanding their stable of business app integrations. This is also creating opportunities for data integrators. Native app integrations and advancements in prebuilt, domain-specific data models can help businesses get to insights faster, without having to build reports and dashboards. These models can also be trained to address specific business needs. Analyzing complex datasets is also becoming simpler and faster with auto modeling and blending capabilities. This is paving the way for real-time, cross-functional analytics that provide 360° business insights.
The ROI and utility of dashboards are under attack! Businesses are looking beyond primitive structuring capabilities to have data and insights presented without bias, and with proper empathy and context so that teams can make more informed decisions. BI vendors are also exploring ingenious ways of demystifying complex KPIs and humanizing data interactions. Some of these consumerized insight delivery experiences are in the form of presentations, purpose-built portals, documents, and much more. These dynamic insight delivery mechanisms are becoming even more immersive and interactive with the augmentation of AI.
Modern self-service BI and analytics platforms are engineered to keep a close watch over KPIs. The intelligence built into these platforms can smartly analyze data, proactively spot outliers, flag critical changes in KPIs, etc. With companies adopting more business applications with contextual integration capabilities, BI platforms can deliver key data alerts in the context of any application's workflow without having to log in to the analytics app. This reduces the time to respond, enabling businesses to act on alerts instantly. Going forward, with the augmentation of AI and ML capabilities, platforms will be able to intelligently decide the necessary actions to be triggered based on insights, as they happen.
Apart from independent software vendors and business consultants embedding BI into their applications, markets are witnessing an uptick in businesses natively embedding BI into their existing applications meant for internal consumption. This is made possible through composable analytics that harness low code / no code capabilities to create user-focused apps from existing assets.
BI vendors continue to enhance their API stacks consciously, making them more robust for shorter development cycles, with more prebuilt and reusable components and less hand-coding. This also enables teams to build functions based on business needs. With the gaining popularity of infused analytics, B2B applications will deliver a more natural analytics experience as part of their workflow. This will cut down the number of applications used for analyzing data by delivering an in-context, all-in-one analytics experience.
Given the never-ending need to analyze data, investing in BI and analytics is increasingly becoming a must for businesses around the world. In this context, it's crucial to keep a finger on the pulse of the market to understand the latest developments, for a future-ready approach. These trends can act as a baseline while embracing BI and analytics or evaluating vendors.
Clarence Rozario, Director of Product Management – BI & Analytics Platform, Zoho Corp.
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