With 2013 nearing completion, it’s time to take a look at some of the most visible and important trends for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing topics of this past year and review how they turned out. Which were hype and which ended up driving real value in organisations?

Dashboards
Now considered as the critical link between data and business-aligned decision making capability, dashboards in 2013 completed the long-awaited leap from off-core product complements and niche-player offerings to deep integration with the core BI & DW landscape in order to facilitate greater and greater analytics agility. Vendors recognized the absolute necessity to enable ultra-flexible self-serve BI so that users can answer unanticipated questions and pursue proactive solutions to novel business questions and opportunities.

Mobile BI
Facilitated and expedited by the growing prominence of BOYD strategies, IT responded to the need to deliver analytics on a host of devices. This ended up as a tug-of-war between the simplicity of HTML5 support versus the performance and superior user experience of device-specific applications, and vendors will likely struggle with this going forward into the following year. Another facet we will await eagerly is the extent to which mobile BI availability will be met with subscription from a mobile workforce that truly demands it.

BI in the Cloud
For most organisations, data security concerns remain the largest hurdle to more widespread adoption of cloud solutions for business analytics. Coupled with the infrequent-but-still infuriating service disruptions from infrastructure providers, CIO’s this year struggled to justify the risks associated with deploying mission-critical reporting to the cloud.

Data Science
This was the biggest disappointment of 2013, as companies struggled to attract and retain costly “data science” talent, statistics and mathematics PhD’s who promised to reveal eye-popping insights from mountains of raw data after sifting it just so. Though Big Data initiatives held promise, data scientists seldom earned their full keep this year.

Big Data
Big Data hit mainstream awareness this year, and many BI architects found themselves talking their CIO’s out of (or into) expensive forays into the Big Data wilderness. While some companies demonstrated significant and laudable results from Big Data deployments, many others achieved middling results and failed to meet ROI hurdles.

Appliances & In-Memory
With almost every major BI vendor now offering an in-memory solution, vendors sought to increase the value of these expensive strategies by deepening their products’ integration with their add-on solutions. Whereas previously the value proposition for in-memory processing and/or appliance purchases was often far more cut-and-dried, 2013 saw this become a far more complex question to answer, especially when coupled with big data pressures.

In our next article, we’ll explore my predictions of the hot BI and data warehousing topics for 2014. I’ll talk about which have the greatest potential for contribution, and which might end up as mere flashes-in-the-pan. Stay tuned!

DataHub Writer: Douglas R. Briggs
Mr. Briggs has been active in the fields of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for the entirety of his 17-year career. He was responsible for the early adoption and promulgation of BI at one of the world’s largest consumer product companies and developed their initial BI competency center. He has consulted with numerous other companies and is regard to effective BI practices. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College (Mass).
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Other Articles by Douglas->

With 2013 nearing completion, it’s time to take a look at some of the most visible and important trends for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing topics of this past year and review how they turned out. Which were hype and which ended up driving real value in organisations?

Dashboards
Now considered as the critical link between data and business-aligned decision making capability, dashboards in 2013 completed the long-awaited leap from off-core product complements and niche-player offerings to deep integration with the core BI & DW landscape in order to facilitate greater and greater analytics agility. Vendors recognized the absolute necessity to enable ultra-flexible self-serve BI so that users can answer unanticipated questions and pursue proactive solutions to novel business questions and opportunities.

Mobile BI
Facilitated and expedited by the growing prominence of BOYD strategies, IT responded to the need to deliver analytics on a host of devices. This ended up as a tug-of-war between the simplicity of HTML5 support versus the performance and superior user experience of device-specific applications, and vendors will likely struggle with this going forward into the following year. Another facet we will await eagerly is the extent to which mobile BI availability will be met with subscription from a mobile workforce that truly demands it.

BI in the Cloud
For most organisations, data security concerns remain the largest hurdle to more widespread adoption of cloud solutions for business analytics. Coupled with the infrequent-but-still infuriating service disruptions from infrastructure providers, CIO’s this year struggled to justify the risks associated with deploying mission-critical reporting to the cloud.

Data Science
This was the biggest disappointment of 2013, as companies struggled to attract and retain costly “data science” talent, statistics and mathematics PhD’s who promised to reveal eye-popping insights from mountains of raw data after sifting it just so. Though Big Data initiatives held promise, data scientists seldom earned their full keep this year.

Big Data
Big Data hit mainstream awareness this year, and many BI architects found themselves talking their CIO’s out of (or into) expensive forays into the Big Data wilderness. While some companies demonstrated significant and laudable results from Big Data deployments, many others achieved middling results and failed to meet ROI hurdles.

Appliances & In-Memory
With almost every major BI vendor now offering an in-memory solution, vendors sought to increase the value of these expensive strategies by deepening their products’ integration with their add-on solutions. Whereas previously the value proposition for in-memory processing and/or appliance purchases was often far more cut-and-dried, 2013 saw this become a far more complex question to answer, especially when coupled with big data pressures.

In our next article, we’ll explore my predictions of the hot BI and data warehousing topics for 2014. I’ll talk about which have the greatest potential for contribution, and which might end up as mere flashes-in-the-pan. Stay tuned!

DataHub Writer: Douglas R. Briggs
Mr. Briggs has been active in the fields of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for the entirety of his 17-year career. He was responsible for the early adoption and promulgation of BI at one of the world’s largest consumer product companies and developed their initial BI competency center. He has consulted with numerous other companies and is regard to effective BI practices. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College (Mass).
View Linkedin Profile->
Other Articles by Douglas->