With businesses becoming cognizant of the transformative power of business intelligence software, tools and practices, a pressing need for adoption has arisen. In order to remain competitive in this lean, insight-driven and intelligent business landscape, stakeholders must keep track with present and future trends to keep their systems up to date up to speed.
As the curtains draw their close on 2021, we can’t help but look back at the strides made in business intelligence capabilities this year. Businesses world-wide are redefining the meaning of agility, leveraging their assets and intelligent tools to arrive at quick and data driven decisions. For those of us who live and breathe Business intelligence, the future holds exciting new trends that are transformative and game-changing. Before we dive into the future of BI in 2022, let’s take a step back to remember how we arrived here today.
What is Business Intelligence?
Although considered by many to be a new trend, the concept of Business intelligence is older than one may think. The term was thought to have been first used in the book “Cyclopaedia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes.” by Richard Miller Devens in 1865. In this work, Miller recounts a banker who had managed to best his competition through gathering superior information and analyzing it more accurately to receive benefits from information asymmetry, using the term “business intelligence.”
Today, Business intelligence has taken on a different meaning from what it was in 1865. Nowadays, Business Intelligence or BI for short refers to the practice of utilization of software, services or tools to extract actionable insights from data assets. A popular example of business intelligence may be your smartphone’s ability to alert the user of their irregular or heightened heart rate. It may even be something as complicated as an automatic home loan approval. The business landscape as we know of it is ingrained with functions that leverage BI.
Decision makers are now in possession of huge amounts of data that they hope can provide them with insights. However, to quote William Binney, “data is not intelligence.” Being data intelligent is a prerequisite to being business intelligent. So, what are some factors that drive data intelligence?
- Complete visibility into all your data inventory
- Robust profiling and tagging of digital assets
- Powerful and automated search and cleansing
- Fast and errorless data discovery process
- Automatic data quality monitoring
In many businesses’ journey towards achieving their business intelligence goals, achieving data intelligence is a pivotal first step.
Now let’s look at 5 trends that will disrupt BI in 2022:
Self-service Analytics: Businesses are investing heavily to improve the use of Self Service Analytics to empower business users and generate high quality, actionable insights. The ability to improve organizational collaboration, lower costs and foster learning is also highly desirable.
Data Literacy: Businesses are already in possession of copious amounts of information that often remain unused because they are not completely understood. Improving the ability of users to interact with data along with improving utilization of data assets, compliance with ethical standards and employee education are benefits that businesses will be looking to leverage.
Quick Data discovery: The slow speed of discovery has often been critical in achieving actionable insights. With data intelligence tools like data catalogs, making the discovery process nimble and easy to comprehend, further data discovery trends will be sure to disrupt the space.
AI/ML: Artificial Intelligence will allow for automatic insights, powerful suggestions, automation of repeated tasks, predictive capabilities among many other benefits. Businesses will look to leverage AI/ML capabilities to the fullest in 2022.
Data Security: With a new statistic depicting that businesses fall victim to ransomware attacks every 40 seconds, data security has become a top issue for businesses to consider in their step towards business intelligence. Apart from protecting their valuable data assets, it also allows adopters to ensure smooth customer interaction, helps them meet regulations, and stay ahead of their competitors.
Now that we’ve reviewed the top BI trends to watch out for in 2022, let’s take a step back to reflect on the staggering progress made this year alone in 2021. The future is truly now.
As we look forward to winding down the year, the team at DvSum would like to wish everyone a very happy holidays!
