2011 BI and Data Trend Predictions by Deloitte
I realize it is already 2012 but since the current year’s report has not been released yet I thought this finding still applies. The 2011 Deloitte Consulting Annual Technology Trends report has been released and not surprisingly, amongst the top ten trends identified (based on their potential business impact over the next 18 months), data visualization and real analytics found their way into number one and six. The report has been compiled based on input from clients, analysts, alliances and Deloitte’s network of academic leader and categorized into (Re)Emerging Enablers (trends that many CIOs have spent time, thought and resources on in the past) and Disruptive Deployments (trends that simply present significant new opportunities for the business).
From BI and Analytics point of view, that is a great news and one that is likely to strengthen the position of this field in the context of future developments and priorities for any organization. At present, many businesses are improving their information and data management facilities; however a great deal of potential insight is still buried inside the corporate data silos and not taken advantage of in a form of visual-rich reports and analytics. And even though the business facing output is getting progressively better, majority of the reporting and presentation layer is still based around dry, visually-unappealing and static formula. As Deloitte’s report points out, “the static, tabular approach runs counter to fundamental patterns of human thinking; our brains have been tuned to recognize shapes, detect movements and use touch to explore surroundings and make connections”. This is where visualization can empower any user or stakeholder into making strategic decisions based on easily communicated and understood interpretation of the corporate data.
Visualization in most cases is just a part of Business Intelligence solution which also includes rich analytics suite. Therefore, visualization can stem from analytics, which in turn, as a separate BI realm, provides visibility to drive operational efficiencies as well as a platform yielding new insights and help predict and drive the crucial decisions in the right directions. When in the past most of BI processes were focused on hindsight and past experiences, the modern era BI looks into advanced predictive modeling/analytics, discovery of future trends. Long gone are the days where strategic decisions were made only on unfounded presumptions. Traditional and old-school BI, which we have gradually grew accustomed to, does not seem to cut the mustard anymore. Traditional BI has asked questions, gathered data, cleaned and structured the information, and put it into forms that could be queried and filtered to produce valuable business information that could be used to plan strategies and make decisions. Traditional BI is about creating reports and making inferences about the past and the future. Although this approach has proven to work on a number of levels in the past, businesses eager to develop or maintain their competitive age start looking into more advanced BI practices. This means that instead of going through the data sets and reacting to what’s already happened in a business, the latest BI systems can do more by anticipating what will happen in the future and help plan for those expectations, based on the old data that’s already been collected. What we’re seeing now is shifting away from that batch process to more real-time analysis. That means that BI data can now be analyzed more on the fly, as it comes in, rather than just after it is placed in reports. The old way simply cannot keep up, and many users are overwhelmed by the huge volumes of data coming in quickly. These are the current trends in today’s BI and information support professionals as well as CIOs and managers willing to push their business one step further, should take advantage of both trends identified in Deloitte’s report.
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