6 Business Intelligence Trends to Watch Out for in 2017

  • 14 December 2016
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Business Intelligence (BI) has changed a lot over the years as it has evolved from being an IT department function to a self-service mechanism. As end of every year approaches, analysts and businesses both carefully analyze the trends that will shape BI during the next year. So here’s our list of 5 such trends to make that job easier for you:

Self-Service

The self-service model of business intelligence will continue to rise in 2017 as well. After all, decisions based on some data are better than decisions based on NO DATA. During next year it’ll improve even more, riding on the wave of some meta-trends (i.e. visualization, professional presentation), which will lead to business users being provided their required data in form of social-media like streams or professional dashboards.

More Demand for Consultants and Developers

As data visualization will increase we will see a rise in demand of  Tableau consultants who can help business users in getting most out of sophisticated BI software. Similarly, Tableau Developers will also see a rise in their demand.

Governed Data Discovery

Though self-service BI will continue to rise during the next year, we may certainly see businesses putting some control on the ways of data discovery. This will happen because this year many businesses have learnt about the problems of data inconsistencies the hard way.

Data Quality Control and Management

Again, the focus on data quality will increase during next year as businesses will try to increase the trustworthiness of data being used by their employees. Companies will build internal systems to bring some standardization between data reported by IT departments and data used by individuals to guide their decisions for self-service BI.

SaaS BI

Cloud is a meta trend that continues to revolutionize every aspect of business and life. It has started to cover the BI segment as well with SaaS BI deployments gaining popularity among businesses. This trend will also continue to rise in 2017 because it not only helps in cutting costs and saving precious time but also in controlling data quality more easily.

Predictive Analytics

With more and more businesses already able to make sense of historical data to make decisions, the onus has now shifted to predictive analytics. Now businesses don’t want data to tell about the history alone – they also want it to predict the future. So predictive analytics will certainly find more love in BI community during 2017.

Conclusion

While there’re certainly many other BI trends that will be seen during next year, these are going to be the biggest ones among them. Therefore, you should carefully watch them out and prepare your business for them.

Nidhi Batra

About the author

Nidhi Batra is a marketing and brand communication professional with 10 years of experience working in the dynamic B2B marketing environment. She strategizes, writes, reviews a variety of content for demand generation and sales support activities. Having a Master’s in English from Delhi University, she knows how to navigate her readers on insightful journeys with her SAP published blogs and thought leadership content.