2015 Bi Trends

Top BI Trends for 2015 | Compare Business Products 2015 1

Top BI Trends

for 2015

Helping Users Make

Smarter Decisions


Contents

How Great BI Insights Add Value ................................................................................................................................3

Continuous Data Streams: Can BI Cope? ....................................................................................................................3

Cloud or On-Premises? ...............................................................................................................................................4

Data Security in the Cloud ..........................................................................................................................................5

Collaborate or Perish ..................................................................................................................................................6

Social Media BI ...........................................................................................................................................................7

Buyers Wish Lists .......................................................................................................................................................7

Multi-Screen Support .................................................................................................................................................8

In Summary .................................................................................................................................................................9

References ............................................................................................................................................................... 10


How Great BI Insights Add Value

A large multinational insurance company had been settling claims to the tune of several billion dollars

annually. Looking for greater savings, the company decided to focus on a type of claim that initially

appeared low risk but tended to grow into expensive litigation. To detect such claims early, the company

focused on:

Better profiling of customers

Analyzing customer behavior from their call logs, website visit behavior, social media activity

Social media analysis of individuals and companies suspected of fraud practices

The result? A 1% reduction in annual settlement amounts. These savings translated into tens of millions

of dollars.

The lesson here was not that business intelligence adds to the bottom line. We all know it does. The true

lesson was that BI initiatives that go beyond number crunching can deliver some surprising results. Ever

larger quantities of data are available about clients, competitors and collaborators, and any business that

can truly handle this data and understand the patterns it contains can derive actionable insights.

Continuous Data Streams: Can BI Cope?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing. It comprises all devices - other than PCs, laptops, smartphones

etc. - that can connect to the Internet. IoT devices have built-in communication that allows them to

generate and transfer data about their internal state or the external environment. In 2009, these devices

numbered about 0.9 billion. By 2020, they will have grown to 26 billion. Compare this with the numbers

of PCs, laptops smartphones, etc which shall reach about 7.3 billion by 2020, and it becomes clear

that these new devices will need to be handled efficiently. These 26 billion IoT devices will generate about

$300 billion in revenue via services activities related to the field.

To realize the true potential of these 26 billion devices, we will require BI applications that can cope with

a stream of continuous data rather than with stable, well defined databases.

This will need a fundamental change in the way Business Intelligence applications are conceptualized,

planned and constructed. By its very nature, a data stream is continuous, it does not stop and settle, it

could have breaks in it and there could be gaps in the data. There could be corrupted data in the stream

as well.

The BI application will need to work with imperfect data and yet have the capability to deliver meaningful

output.


This change in BI application capability is not

going to come all of a sudden, niche applications

will emerge at first, for instance in the field of

factory sensors, and based on the inputs from

sensors embedded in the machine tools and

their control systems, real time intelligence will

be created that will in turn be used to manage

operations better.

Some of these niche applications are already

functional; others will emerge as technology

evolves. However, business managers must

understand that the IoT is here to stay. With

time, embedding communication capabilities

into devices will get cheaper and the IoT will

grow rapidly. In 2015 and in the years that follow,

BI applications will be built to take advantage of

this capability.

Cloud or On-Premises?

There is no clear answer to this question as yet. While the vendors are definitely moving in the direction

of cloud-based systems, users are still ambivalent. In fact slightly more than 60% of the user base still

prefers to have their solution hosted internally. This is probably indicative of the value they give to BI

functions and their desire to keep their data secure and under their own control. There is also a perception

that cloud-based systems cannot be customized comprehensively.

This will change gradually as the cost benefits become clearer and

security and availability issues are addressed. We can expect

vendors to focus on highlighting benefits of using cloud-based

systems. Vendors will also create cloud-based systems that can

be customized more closely to what users need. In all probability,

vendors will stress that:

Cloud-based systems are easier to deploy and manage

There is a reduced need for expert IT staffing

Modern systems can be customized easily to give customers the exact functionality they need

Costs are lower

Security and availability needs are met

The Internet of Things will include:

Advanced medical equipment

Factory automation sensors

Farm land sensors

Vehicular data pickups

Remote monitoring for rail and road

systems

Electrical and water distribution

sensors

Weather sensors

Smart building technology

and so on Gartner Research

60% users still prefer

to have their data and

BI solutions hosted on

their own premises.


The expectation is that the numbers of cloud-based BI solution users will continue to increase. However,

the speed of uptake would be gradual and smaller to mid-sized companies would adopt cloud-based

solutions earlier. Larger companies are more conservative and might have already made substantial

investments in their on-premise solutions, hence they may take a little longer to switch.

Data Security in the Cloud

Over the last two years, governments have begun to exercise a greater degree of control over cloud-

based data. The US Government has been particularly active and there have been court judgments that

say that a local search warrant issued against a person or a company in the US will also have jurisdiction

over data that they may have stored in a data center outside the US. While the issue is still not resolved

(Microsoft has gone to court seeking quashing of the part of the order that applies to foreign data centers),

many businesses have begun to worry about the security of their data, from hackers as well as the

government. There have even been instances when the owner of the data was not even informed that

their data had been handed over to the government.

Many computer security vendors have begun to offer data security solutions that tokenize selected data

before it is stored. This is different from encryption. Tokenization replaces critical data with a token that

has the same format as the data but has a

meaningless value. Since the token has the same

format as the original data, any application using it

can continue to function as before. However just

before the results are displayed to users, the tokens

are replaced by their real values. Thus, if data stored

in the cloud is stolen, only tokenized values are

delivered.

As mentioned, tokenization solutions are presently

offered by vendors who claim to be able to provide

security while ensuring any application will continue

to function as before. Their solutions have been

shown to work with ERP, CRM and BI solutions from all vendors. Such solutions are gaining in popularity

because absolutely no changes are required to be made to complex applications.

It is very likely that 2015 will see at least some of the more agile BI solution providers, probably some of

the midsized ones, offer built-in tokenization solutions. This is certainly something that knowledgeable

customers will look for.

Tokenization is substituting a

sensitive data element with a

non-sensitive equivalent,

referred to as a token that has

no extrinsic or exploitable

meaning or value

Wikipedia


Collaborate or Perish

In the last two to three years, BI has moved from being an individual activity to a collaborative one.

Traditionally, a BI practitioner sat by herself and used the data and the tools at her disposal to understand

trends and draw lessons. BI could be a lonely task under such circumstances, especially so because you

have to sell the results of the analysis to the management.

In recent years however, developers have understood the power of crowdsourcing ideas. If you are

dealing with a large quantity of complex data, many minds work better than one. Besides, while there

may be silos in a business, the business itself does not work in silos. Sales, marketing, manufacturing

and all the other departments have to work together to produce goods and services that a customer

values. Collaborative BI uses the expertise of all these domains so that the situation is better understood

and its impact on the business as a whole is better appreciated.

A well-designed collaborative BI application has the collaboration tools built in and it encourages people

to work together rather than only focus on one aspect of the business.

In a well-designed collaborative BI application, participants in the decision making progress work

together, regardless of physical location and:

Share their interpretation of the reports and insights generated by the BI tool

Work together on charts, grids and infographics

Work seamlessly inside and outside the corporate firewall to involve employees and partners in

the BI generation process

Expand the use of BI tools by helping it gain widespread acceptance

In almost all cases, collaborative BI is able to generate more meaningful insights and give a better return

on investment. BI vendors have recognized this and a number of BI solutions are being optimized for

collaborative use. In many cases, users are not charged anything extra for the collaborative features. We

expect the collaboration to become easier and more effective in 2015.

If there is one thing that is holding people back from more pervasive collaboration, it is the company

culture. Most people are worried about placing their views on record for everyone else in the group to

see. Businesses will need to create a culture of openness and this can only be done top down. An

associated issue will be learning how to collaborate. We have seen this in email use where people send

a mundane message to a long list of people just in case and these messages end up clogging inboxes

and wasting everyones time. Such cultural issues will take time to change and evolve. Therefore while

the capability for collaboration will exist, businesses will only gradually learn to take full advantage of

collaborative BI.

Businesses that can change their culture and bring genuine internal collaboration will see much greater

benefits.


Social Media BI

Social media is becoming increasingly powerful as a tool for

sharing, as well as shaping, opinion and businesses have to be

aware of what is being said about them in social media. As a

business grows, the chatter about it on social media increases

as well and while these conversations have great value, this can

be hard to discover or make sense of.

We saw in the first section of this report how the multinational insurance company used social BI to

understand its customers better and saved tens of millions of dollars annually.

A social media BI tool is able to answer questions such as the following:

What is being said about your business?

Who is saying it?

What is the frequency of their posts?

What do people feel about your current products and services?

What kind of responses do their comments generate?

What is being said about your competitors?

This kind of information can be invaluable to a company trying to improve its market share or for one that

is looking for new products ideas. Many social media sites themselves have understood the value of user

generated content and are offering analytical services that you can use straight away.

Buyers Wish Lists

A BI application or solution is not an IT toolkit and

therefore it is no surprise that the vast majority of BI

solution buyers are not IT professionals but business

professionals. The bulk of enquiries come from the people

in operations who need BI as a tool to help them run their

businesses better.

What do most of the users of BI solutions want from their

software?

The vast majority of users want high quality and easily customizable dashboards and scorecards, they

want built-in tools that let them run queries and create reports with ease. The end user, the business

professional, is not really interested in deeply technical issues such as the extract, transform and load

IT Professional

37%Business

Professional63%

Who Demands BI Software?


functions (ETL), or issues of online analytical processing (OLAP), or even things like data mining and BI

cubes. All of these advanced concepts are probably for the advanced data scientist.

The business professional simply wants to get her job done. Ease of use will be an important asset. As

more vendors grasp this essential requirement, we will see suites that are intuitive, easy to use and assist

the user in quickly getting what she wants. 2015 and the years to come will offer solutions that dont

require a knowledge of advanced analytic techniques.

The value of data analytics expertise is not undermined: this will become a niche field for the highly

qualified expert. Most users will get by with the basic functions that can be easily understood and used.

An overwhelming majority of users want a BI

Suite that is complete and ready to use out

of the box. They are not interested in a best

of breed solution that combines offerings

from different sources to create something

extremely advanced. Businesses want

simplicity of management and use and they

will drive vendors to create simple solutions

that do not need to be managed by IT

experts.

Multi-Screen Support

User are spoilt when it comes to choice of platform. They can use their desktops, laptops, mobile devices

and even smart watches. BI solutions will adapt to whichever screen size the user is working with and

display data that is most critical for the user at that moment in time. With time, multi-screen support will

get better and more effective.

While the very small screens, such as smart watch screens, have not yet gone mainstream, vendors will

start moving in that direction as well. One can easily expect reminders and alerts to show up on these

small devices in the coming year.

How long will it take for BI dashboards to be available on Goggle Glass? We cannot answer this question

with any certainty yet, but the technology exists and is now coming to mainstream users. It is only a

matter of time when Glass will show up in business meetings with its users getting absolutely updated

information from their BI systems.

While technology matures quickly, there will be issues of business etiquette associated with wearable

devices such as Glass that will take longer to evolve.

98%

77%

40%

20%

20%

8%

Quality dashboard / scorecards

Querying and reporting

Data warehouse

ETL

OLAP

Data Mining & Predictive

What Do the Users Really Want?


In Summary

To conclude, one can say that Business Intelligence applications will need to adapt to some major

changes that are now becoming mainstream. One major change is the way data streams in for analysis.

Whereas previously, BI used data that had been collected in a database, an ever increasing number of

devices with embedded sensors and communication capabilities will generate continuous streams of

data. BI solutions will need to handle these streams and generate meaningful insights and analysis. While

databases will not go away anytime soon, BI solutions will need to handle large data streams as well.

For all the news and hype surrounding the cloud, users are still careful about where their data is stored.

There are worries about security and with governments seeking to control cloud-based storage and

demanding access to stored data, these worries are getting accentuated. Expect to see innovative

security services being developed. This is not restricted to BI alone but to all kinds of applications that

store their data in the cloud.

There is value in a multi-disciplinary approach to data analysis. This is leading to the emergence of

collaborative BI where professionals from different branches of a business can work together to draw

more multi-dimensional insights.

Social Media BI is yet another field that has become important. People say a lot on social media and an

analysis of what is being said about your company, its line of business and its competitors can give rise

to valuable insights that no business can ignore.

The demand for a BI solution is emerging more from the business professionals in a company rather than

from the IT professionals. This is only to be expected because the business professional gains the most

from a successful BI implementation. As a consequence of the demand originating from business people,

there is also a requirement that the solution be easy to use and provide just the functionality that business

professionals need. Many complex functions are not being seen as adding immediate value and may

stay confined to very niche and specialist areas.

The last point we covered is about multiple types of display screens. These can range from the data wall

to the smart watch. A smart BI solution will detect the screen the user is using and will tailor its display

accordingly.

The truly successful BI applications will blend themselves in the work flow of the company so successfully

that users will not realize that the insights they are getting are arising from a separate application program.

The best BI solutions will make business professionals smarter.


References

Gartner Press Release on the Internet of Things

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2636073

More details on the IoT

http://www.businessinsider.in/Heres-Why-The-Internet-Of-Things-Will-Be-Huge-And-Drive-

Tremendous-Value-For-People-And-Businesses/articleshow/24615352.cms

Cloud Based BI

http://www.redcapgroup.com/media/98e342dd-420c-4716-be25-

f21a14f46691/Sector%20Reports/2014-04-09_Business_Intellegence_Report_April_2014_pdf

De Filippi, P, McCarthy, S, Cloud Computing: Centralization and Data Sovereignty European Journal

for Law and Technology, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2012, available at http://ejlt.org/article/view/101/234

US Judgment on Cloud Data Sovereignty

http://www.zdnet.com/us-arrogance-puts-further-doubt-on-cloud-data-sovereignty-7000028829/

Collaborative BI

http://sandhill.com/article/dresner-report-on-collaborative-business-intelligence-trends-reveals-where-

collaboration-is-most-valued/

Data on customer preferences

http://www.softwareadvice.com/bi/buyerview/report-2014/

2015 Bi Trends

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