The year 2020 has brought fundamental changes to many industries. One such major sector is business where technology disruption was long pending. As the Covid-19 pandemic brought a change in the working system, businesses quickly switched to online mode for working, selling, marketing, etc. Remarkably, Business Intelligence (BI) was also highly adopted during the period. Business intelligence has become an indispensable asset to organisations, both big and small. Howard Dresner first coined the term 'business intelligence' in 1989 referring to data analysis tools and techniques used to support business decision-making processes. Over the past two decades since its formation, business intelligence has been revolutionised in many ways. Since everyone wants to leverage the technology for good, many business intelligence trends are expected to shift in the upcoming year. Henceforth, Analytics Insight brings you a list of business intelligence to look out for in 2021.
SaaS is one of the business intelligence technologies that saw greater adoption in 2020. It is expected to grow further in 2021 with more businesses embracing the tool in order to gain more flexibility and access to the data on the cloud, from any device. SaaS is becoming the first choice for remote and disparate teams that need solutions which will help them to optimise their business processes and ensure that there are no troubles by working remotely. SaaS can help companies in sustainable growth, which is mandatory at an uncertain period like this.
A major phase of the business depends on interaction. Managers and workers need to interact differently with each other and customers to sustain the competitive market. Due to this, a strong emergence of collaborative BI can be seen rising. Collaborative BI is the combination of tools, including social media and other modern technologies, with online BI tools. These BI tools make sharing easier in generating automated reports that can be scheduled at specific times to specific people. Collaborative information, information enhancement, and collective decision-making are the key focus of new collaborative BI solutions.
Data analytics is a hectic process that involves data scientist in it. However, this could be made simple with the advent of self-service BI (SSBI). With the help of SSBI, business users find it more comfortable to access analytics tools without the help of data scientists who are quite expensive. Ultimately, this induced the perpetual craving towards self-service and flexibility in analysis and reporting. Since SSBI is a top priority for many businesses, it is expected to see growth in 2021.
It is the work of a business executive to clearly explain the data story. It doesn't matter how complicated the data is. However hard an organisation works to extract accurate analysis from data analytics solutions, explaining a data story with particular details is what makes a cut. All data storytelling context to illustrate the point the person explaining the visual and the audience they are addressing. Since data visualisation provides a lot of freedom with its tools, it is up to the data scientist to pick the easy and most comfortable one.
Mobile business intelligence is the ability to access BI-related data such as KPIs, business metrics, and dashboards on mobile devices. Even though when the concept of mobile BI dates back to 1990s when the mobile devices came aboard, the actual improvement is only seen now. Mobile BI is becoming more incorporated into BI solutions and next year, the trend is anticipated to gain more importance.
The line between business intelligence and business analytics is narrowing. Entities with less employee strength are more likely to give the future of business analytics in the hands of the non-skilled analysts called 'citizen data analysts.' In order to adapt to the explosive adoption rates of business analytics, market forces would dictate the change of the workforce. Fortunately, self-service BI is embracing to all kinds of platforms, user-levels and deployments instead of skilled professionals.
Embedded BI reduces the workload on analytics teams, giving end users a faster way to obtain the insights they need while allowing analytics teams to focus on new products that help grow and differentiate the business. Embedded analytics gives end users more power to be able to work with the data like zoom in, aggregate it, and look at it from different angles with the press of a button. The usage of embedded analytics is expected to intensify further in 2021.
According to Gartner, RPA enriched by AI and machine learning becomes the core enabling technology of hyperautomation. Combining RPA and AI technologies offer the power and flexibility to automate where automation was never possible before like undocumented processes that rely on unstructured inputs. Hyperautomation is the widespread application of technologies across an enterprise to automate decisions. The usage of hyperautomation in organizations will grow in the upcoming year.
Businesses no more rely on email subscriptions or conduct surveys to collect consumer data. The disruption of Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the technology landscape with various resources where data is available. In 2021, business analysts will have access to more data sources than ever before, giving companies with rich resources to guide their operations, marketing and sales decision-making.
With data analytics inherently linked to business intelligence, the expectation in augmented analytics to have an impact on the BI platform is growing. Augmented analytics incorporates AI techniques and machine learning-based automation to augment human intelligence and provide contextual awareness. According to Gartner, augmented analytics is one of the top data analytics trends to watch out for in 2021.
