Analytics in 2020: Harnessing the Trends of the Year to Come

In the last few years, BI has been making tremendous amounts of progress. This is big data and cloud computing. A study by Gartner had shown that insufficient quality of data had cost organizations an approximate of US$15 million a year, creating momentum to render this suite of technologies more available. As a result, new, better visualization tools have come to replace spreadsheets, making analytics more accessible to the masses.

There are no unanimous leaders in this field. A few notable mentions are Tableau as well as Power BI, but the vast majority of the market is software that was developed internally by the companies for their own specific needs. The latter is mostly made up of various API-integrated third-party services.

The most common usage scenario is regional analytics for retailers and transportation companies. Mainly, this has to do with bird's eye view of the operation and each specific sales region in particular. For example, the income map of a territorial district provides many great data correlations that wouldn't be obvious otherwise.

Right now, we've reached a point where you can achieve high levels of awareness with relatively low effort simply because many demographic datasets are available out-of-the-box.

Expectation from Analytics

Map of the Sealed Transactions

Visualization of sales was not always necessary for the C-level annual report. Now, the situation is nothing but different with even smaller companies getting on board with geospatial analytics. It tells you things like: "how many sales reps had visited the area over the past month?" or "which competitors had opened new branches on our turf?", and many more.

Consulting-as-a-Service

As-a-Service is gaining momentum and analytics are no exception. All due to a notable rise in demand for analytics. In this lane, McKinsey Solutions are the ones to come up the most. They grant easy access to things like quick reports exactly when they are required without delaying your decision-making by two months or more. No need to wait and no need to look for a data scientist.

Interactive Solutions

These ones had made a huge leap. Powerful online maps with vast filtering options provide great informative value while simultaneously offering immense availability. Simply follow the link and you've got it.

Products like these create a new kind of synergistic relationship between the consulting departments and developer teams, integrating the results into complete projects. Looking into 2020 we might observe a curious phenomenon of "services within services" due to the overheated demand for solutions that are far more miscellaneous than anything that is readily readily.

Digital Twins

With spatial analytics, data had gotten the third dimension that's of tremendous value. For things material, it had allowed to create realistic models – the so-called "digital twins" that allow to gain an overarching perspective over anything in our material world. Digital twins let you view and remodel any object no matter the size or complexity.

Even though still expensive now, the production of these "clones" is getting progressively cheaper as technology progresses and becomes more optimized.

The Core Challenges of 2020

1. The companies are getting their own analytics teams with AI products becoming cheaper. For this reason, clients will require and purchase only a select number of services. To supply this demand they would have to be presented in a very segmented fashion.

2. Aside from the prices and volumes of data, the competition will also affect data formats. These are map as a product or prediction as a product that will grant a very narrow perspective on things like "the state of affairs" and "the best course of action".

3. Smaller consulting firms will find harder time combining data management, marketing and many things more. At the very least, the cleansing and enrichment of data will have to be outsourced.

Into the New Twenties

The information itself is evolving, further pushing the ways we process big insights. Here, you can see how robust and complex it is getting in analytics at the very start of the new decade. The industry is growing and becoming more sophisticated, largely in ways that could never be anticipated even a couple of years ago.

Long story short, it is getting more interesting and, hopefully, these insights will get you ready to make hay in 2020.