What's Next For BI? 5 Trends To watch Out For In 2019

2. THE BI BOOM When it comes to Business Intelligence the adoption statistics are so much encouraging that the ones who chose to sit on the fence till now, are also confidently taking much-needed plunge into the deep sea of BI & Analytics opportunities. Reason behind the exponential surge in BI adoption and development realm is simple - while businesses realised the huge potential of data in helping them not just survive but also thrive in the market, they also realised that the first step to ensure the correct leverage of data is to transform the way data is seen. And certainly, BI was the answer to that quest. Lack of real-time, authentic and exhaustive information were few of the challenges which barricaded BI from experiencing its full bloom earlier but today we can safely predict that the market is headed upwards. However, the path may not be devoid of any delays or trials, but it seems that they are going to act as nothing but springboards for further accomplishments and development in the domain. Global Business Intelligence (BI) market is expected to reach $29.48 billion by 2022 with a CAGR of 11.1%. (1) ©Denave

3. THE YEAR AHEAD Heightened integration of AI and Machine Learning in business processes, significant increase in cloud migration by businesses of all scale and sizes, increased stringency when it comes to data security and privacy etc. are some of the factors which will be defining the BI trend pitch for the coming year. Obviously, self-serving BI still remains the over-arching data democratizing trend which is going to dominate the scenario with the tool-access and on-demand report generation becoming more user-friendly and less tech-dependent than ever before. Also, cloud migration and the drift towards hybrid cloud adoption with centrally calibrated access will also be the defining point for BI as more and more firms embrace the power of cloud analytics and opt for a multi-cloud strategy. As per Gartner, 70% of businesses will go for multi-cloud implementations by 2019 (this figure stood at 10% in 2016) and by 2021, more than half of global enterprises who are already using cloud today will adopt an all-in cloud strategy.2, 3 While there is a huge confluence among the views expressed by industry leaders and studies when it comes to BI predictions for 2019, there are a couple of outlier forecasts as well which makes it to the list of expected trends. Let’s take a look. ©Denave

4. #1 TREND THE NEXT GEN OF MOBILE BI Mobile BI 2.0 is no more about replicating the desktop experience on the mobile. Precisely because consumption behaviour varies not just from person to person but from device to device as well. The person may be comfortable seeing the dashboard and insights on a desktop in a certain way while he may want a crisper and to-the-point narrative for mobile or any other on-the-go device. Hence, having a well-rounder, comprehensive and yet, differentiated interface experience for mobile is what can get brownie points for vendors. Despite the segregation, having a seamless connect between all of them is what can be a game-changer in the coming year. While attempts have been continual in this direction since quite some time, we have not seen the trend coming of its age completely yet. However, given the existent demand gap, the trend is certain to drive big in 2019. Apart from being a strong-support component in the realm of self- serving BI (since mobile BI means higher penetration within the company), the trend is going to speed-up the decision-making process, shall shorten the workflow and lead to improved internal communication. Thus, a win-win from all the possible angles. ©Denave

5. #2 TREND DE-SEGREGATED BI Aggregation was a huge thing earlier and vendors have benefitted from the same – not because it was a trend but because, it was the only way for users to leverage the BI tool and consume the insights. Logging onto the vendor applications and viewing the dashboards and consuming other important content – but all from the same app access, can become a thing of past very soon. It’s a dynamic world, people are on the move and paucity of time can be regarded as an understatement, leave alone the competitiveness shrouding the entire BI ballgame for vendors. On-demand portability – anytime, anywhere access of dashboards and other content on the device and platform of choice instead of being gated to a particular app, is what the user will put up as a demand instead of a wish going forward. And it is not a new thing with multiple firms already embedding their analytics and insights into other popular apps – be it a mail app or a communication platform like slack, but certainly, it hasn’t picked up the trending-pace yet, which is expected to ‘not-be’ the case in the coming year. It is going to be all about having perfected a multi-channel BI content delivery right when it is demanded. ©Denave

6. #3 TREND RISE OF NATURAL LANGUAGE BI As per Gartner, natural-language generation will be a standard feature of 90% of modern BI and analytics platforms and 50% of analytics queries will be generated using search, natural-language query or voice, or will be auto-generated by 2019 (4). What does this prediction points towards after all? The type-search query procedure is becoming more and more obsolete with each passing day and the way people are latching onto Siri, Alexa, etc. even for their day-to-day chores, voice is going to become the primary command mode even in businesses. And it makes quite a strong case also since we are talking about making sense of such a humungous amount of unstructured data. With mobile platforms becoming the preferred consumption medium, there is going to be a huge demand for replacing the type-search query interface with a voice-led one. The key lies in perfecting the understanding of human language, expressions, tonality etc. and we are aware of the progress undertaken in that direction lately. The way google assistant can tell you whether or not will it rain tomorrow, similarly, imagine yourself asking your BI tool while walking in the mall, that how has been the customer sentiment over the last one week and getting a real-time answer just then. That’s the future. ©Denave

7. #4 TREND MANDATED DATA GOVERNANCE With data security becoming an issue bigger than anything else, privacy governance of the same will be an opportunity disguised as necessity. It is predicted that by 2020, almost 40% of large-league organisations will be using one or the other pseudonymization technique for masking their data against the threat of data breach.(4) The rush for adopting self-serving BI coupled with domain inexperience has led to multiple such instances where the user-trust has been made susceptible to compromise. However, the scene is going to be a thing of the past quite soon. Vendors are already working double time to strengthen a collaborative model where none of the business values of BI are compromised whilst maintaining the data security guard as well. The business world is fast transitioning into a more secure yet more vulnerable spot. While GDPR is pioneering the compliance management in European lands and CCPA is doing the same within the US states, the rest of the world is also catching up fast. In fact, comparison between on-premise or cloud BI is expected to remain debatable for firms when it comes to data security but still, data governance through sophisticated compliance management will be a key trend in the BI world in 2019. ©Denave

8. #5 TREND NEXT LEVEL DATA DISCOVERY TOOLS Similar to the industry-wide movement towards self-serving BI, the reliance of C-suite on highly skilled data scientists is going to decrease. After all, such dependency means a potential inhibiting gap which may be responsible for delayed decision-making sometime or the other. Humans are wired in a manner that they consume visually appealing data more easily in comparison to a complex set of data. Therefore, the new-age advanced visualisation tools become more of an obvious progression than a choice for BI solution providers. We are moving away from complex reports because no more it is synonymous with being the ‘only’ correct form and the era of detailed insights is taken over by bite-sized content which is still loaded with the same amount of information – but in an easily consumable format. Elaborate reports prepared with the help of complex analytical tools by data scientists may be informative but would have less attention span and mind space in comparison to the intuitive and easy-to-grasp reports which can be generated with the help of advanced data discovery and visualisation tools. Take our word, this trend is not expected to stay within the bounds of corporate boardrooms but will definitely proliferate into the next-level hierarchies as well. ©Denave

9. MOVING TOWARDS A DATA-DRIVEN FUTURE These can be easily termed as best time in the realm of advancements in BI space. Self-serving BI will make the benefits of BI more accessible and simpler to understand even for people with limited to no technical or statistical knowledge. AI will reduce the interface-learning barrier and provision more openly accessible to technology and insights even by non-technical users. The newest disruption - Augmented Analytics (AA), will also be driven by Artificial Intelligence. As per studies, 75% of prebuilt reports will be replaced with or augmented by automated insights delivered on ‘most needed’ basis by the year 2021.5 Major enhancements can also be expected in data quality with the provision of bringing data together from disparate applications and compiling it in a usable system without affecting the validity of the original source data. Another major change-driver would be the trend of Automation. By 2020, more than 40% of data science tasks will be automated, resulting in increased productivity and broader usage by citizen data scientists.4 All in all, 2019 is expected to keep the BI solution providers on their toes while the businesses would be getting the maximum advantage of this rushed-up race to BI excellence. The key to this leverage will lie in selecting the best partner who would not only provide BI benefits but will also substantiate it with the best sales enablement strategies to deliver wholesome results you’d been aiming for. ©Denave

10. SOURCES 1. https://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=5619 2. http://www.xorlogics.com/2018/06/18/how-to-better-secure-multi-cloud-environments/ 3. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/cloud-computing-enters-its-second-decade/ 4. https://www.gartner.com/ngw/globalassets/en/information-technology/documents/insights/100-data- and-analytics-predictions.pdf 5. https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-4UCCMN1&ct=180329&st=sb ©Denave

11. For more sales insights, visit www.denave.com/resources ©Denave2019