As a follow-up to our last article, a retrospective about trends from 2013, it’s natural to look forward into the upcoming year and do our best to predict the trends that will dominate the BI and Data Warehouse industry, and to predict the ways in which they will impact companies seeking to make the most of new developments. Some of the trends are extensions of this past year’s directions and some are new.

BI in the Cloud
Each year that passes demonstrates the increasing reliability and acceptability of cloud deployments of all types. This year we expect to approach or pass the tipping point and begin seeing a majority of BI deployments going into cloud and SaaS vendor solutions. Cost and reliability pressures will continue to push CIO’s toward lowering TCO for implementations by considering cloud solutions with greater thoroughness. This year more CIO’s will embrace BI cloud solutions for the benefits of flexibility, extensibility, and availability. Associated costs will shift from internal support, storage, and hardware to bandwidth and per-user charges.

Mobile BI
As BYOD deployments reach a saturation point among companies seeking to provide greater device flexibility to their workforces, mobile BI channels will increase in importance. Companies with mobile or remote workers will demand the availability of full-service BI capabilities on tablets and smartphones. BI Architects will begin to plan implementations with this requirement in mind, even if it is not immediately identified and articulated by the business.

Predictive Analytics
This hot trend from 2013 will gather steam in 2014, as the maturation of Big Data and in-memory processing will enable computational sophistication on raw data volumes previously unavailable to most companies. It will also suffer the hurdle of exaggerated expectations, as the novelty of predictive analytics will obscure a reasonable and results-based understanding of its accuracy and potential business-decision value.

BI-enabled “Storytelling”
The increasing volume of data available to users for analysis will increase the need for “data contextuality”, and stories will enable users to communicate opportunities and insights using data. BI reporting paradigms and reporting orientations that enable users to tell a story through the data (i.e.: what is happening, what it means, what we should do) will generate significantly greater value than undirected dashboards and visualizations.

Agile BI
We’ve seen the departure of BI away from IT-centric reporting toward business-process-integrated and user-oriented information discovery. This will accelerate as vendors continue to strengthen the end-user capabilities of their tools toward self-service paradigms. It will also make greater storage and processing resource demands on implementation platforms. IT teams must make sure they are poised to accommodate this.

Appliances & In-Memory
Vendors will work to articulate the manner in which each of their various solutions provides the greatest value, while customers will have to weigh carefully the trade-offs between cost, processing resource demands, and availability of support resources. We don’t expect consolidation of any vendors this year, and customers will still have to judge carefully which solution integrates best with their overall BI & DW strategy.

Overall, 2014 stands to be a promising and interesting year for those in the BI and Data Warehousing field, as technological developments meet cultural shifts in the way BI is seen and leveraged in companies to create value. We’ll keep an eye on these trends and continue to report as they develop.

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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As a follow-up to our last article, a retrospective about trends from 2013, it’s natural to look forward into the upcoming year and do our best to predict the trends that will dominate the BI and Data Warehouse industry, and to predict the ways in which they will impact companies seeking to make the most of new developments. Some of the trends are extensions of this past year’s directions and some are new.

BI in the Cloud
Each year that passes demonstrates the increasing reliability and acceptability of cloud deployments of all types. This year we expect to approach or pass the tipping point and begin seeing a majority of BI deployments going into cloud and SaaS vendor solutions. Cost and reliability pressures will continue to push CIO’s toward lowering TCO for implementations by considering cloud solutions with greater thoroughness. This year more CIO’s will embrace BI cloud solutions for the benefits of flexibility, extensibility, and availability. Associated costs will shift from internal support, storage, and hardware to bandwidth and per-user charges.

Mobile BI
As BYOD deployments reach a saturation point among companies seeking to provide greater device flexibility to their workforces, mobile BI channels will increase in importance. Companies with mobile or remote workers will demand the availability of full-service BI capabilities on tablets and smartphones. BI Architects will begin to plan implementations with this requirement in mind, even if it is not immediately identified and articulated by the business.

Predictive Analytics
This hot trend from 2013 will gather steam in 2014, as the maturation of Big Data and in-memory processing will enable computational sophistication on raw data volumes previously unavailable to most companies. It will also suffer the hurdle of exaggerated expectations, as the novelty of predictive analytics will obscure a reasonable and results-based understanding of its accuracy and potential business-decision value.

BI-enabled “Storytelling”
The increasing volume of data available to users for analysis will increase the need for “data contextuality”, and stories will enable users to communicate opportunities and insights using data. BI reporting paradigms and reporting orientations that enable users to tell a story through the data (i.e.: what is happening, what it means, what we should do) will generate significantly greater value than undirected dashboards and visualizations.

Agile BI
We’ve seen the departure of BI away from IT-centric reporting toward business-process-integrated and user-oriented information discovery. This will accelerate as vendors continue to strengthen the end-user capabilities of their tools toward self-service paradigms. It will also make greater storage and processing resource demands on implementation platforms. IT teams must make sure they are poised to accommodate this.

Appliances & In-Memory
Vendors will work to articulate the manner in which each of their various solutions provides the greatest value, while customers will have to weigh carefully the trade-offs between cost, processing resource demands, and availability of support resources. We don’t expect consolidation of any vendors this year, and customers will still have to judge carefully which solution integrates best with their overall BI & DW strategy.

Overall, 2014 stands to be a promising and interesting year for those in the BI and Data Warehousing field, as technological developments meet cultural shifts in the way BI is seen and leveraged in companies to create value. We’ll keep an eye on these trends and continue to report as they develop.

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->