Business Intelligence – look into the future

In the business world, it is essential to gain advantage over competitors. In order to have the edge over our rivals, we need well-thought-out and carefully planned decisions.  Data-analysis, as a method, is getting more and more widespread in decision-making, which means that there is a well-coordinated work within the whole enterprise using information and communication technologies and introducing more complex business solutions.  

The Gartner market research company predicts that a new generation of business intelligence will appear. To justify this idea, they mentioned that there is a growing demand for exploring connections among data.

According to the study of Tableau Software, the most important trends of 2015 in business intelligence are the following:

Data Governance in transition:

In the world of self-service analytics, we cannot simply lock up data or forbid data processing. Questions we have to ask are whether the data used in business planning and decision making are up-to-date; how the different departments coordinate; and what the legal requirements of security questions are.

Key questions for determining data-using strategies:

team: its task is to review the existing data, then to create an effective self-service system. It is about the coordinated work of computer engineers and managers, since it is necessary to organize the different needs into one system in order to create a successful and holistic structure. In addition, the process is suitable for discovering new sources.

data quality: the formed system has to be able to direct users towards up-to-date, accurate shared data

data security: classifying data and ranking access levels can help to preserve the protection of delicate information   

report: preparing straightforward guidelines which explain how to access data

Social intelligence:

For businesses, it is crucial to comprehensively analyze the data of social networks, because information gained from this analysis can show the tendencies and courses of target audience’s interest. Organizations are in possession of up-to-date information about what their customers talk about; when a product or topic gets popular. Feedbacks, posts, reactions (all of which are recorded) related to products and campaigns create a vast data volume whose study leads us to understand current trends and behaviors.

Simple, clear-cut usage:

Due to applied innovation in the past decade, the process of data-storage, usage and supervision has become obscure. Thus, in the future, simple user interface will become widespread and one of its embodiments is data visualization. This method will help to carry out self-service analyses, to share, to facilitate access to operational, planning and financial information. If we have the necessary information, it can increase the operational effectiveness.

Widely used cloud analysis:

While previously, data usage was limited to cloud-based data, in the past years, analysis of information stored on storage devices has appeared. From this year on, enterprises will choose this cloud-based access, only if they can specifically employ it in their business.

Spread of interactive data:

By means of technology, information is interactive enough to motivate us to have a discussion and to talk about something in a meaningful way. Information analysis enables the invention of new perspectives and aspects for the audience.

Spread of visual information:

Online news-services recognized that visuality is gaining more and more importance; therefore, the era of data diagrams and graphs is on the rise. Tables and graphs that visualize connections help us understand information better.

Technical devices in the pocket:

Mobile analytics tools are especially suitable for ensuring access to information even if we are not sitting beside our desks.  Analytics provide those who are out of office with fast and live data.

 

These forecasts also show how important it is to use new and modern devices and systems, which we have to take into consideration if we do not wish to lag behind our competitors.