Data never stops, and neither does business. Amidst global socio-economic crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, business intelligence is more critical now than ever for enterprises to survive and thrive. While trends in business intelligence like automation, the cloud and mobile analytics continue to disrupt the data industry, what’s in store next year and beyond?

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This article looks at the key business intelligence trends for this year and the near future.

Key Takeaways

• BI Verticals in the Cloud Will Be In Demand.
• Self-service BI Will Drive Data Literacy Initiatives.
• Data Science Will Be a Niche Skill Despite the Rise of Citizen Data Scientists.
• Augmented Analytics and Automation Will Drive Delivery Pipelines.
• Embeddable Data Stories Will Deliver Insight To You.
• Natural Language Insight Will Help You Do More With BI.
• Data Governance Will Be a Primary Ask When Seeking BI Software.
• Mobile Analytics Will Continue to Form a Significant Part of BI.

Top Trends

1. Cloud BI Verticals Will Be In Demand

The COVID-19 pandemic put companies and industries in emergency mode as they scrambled to make sense of the situation. Many businesses were forced to look hard at their existing BI strategies.

On-premise solutions couldn’t measure up to the challenge of a largely remote workforce, and companies realigned their budgets to make room for migration to cloud BI and analytics platforms.

Mike Brody, CEO of Exago, a software vendor for embedded BI for SaaS providers, said their company adapted quickly to the transition to remote work — in fact, it’s thriving.

“In many ways, we’re more effective than we were before. COVID didn’t stop a lot of people, especially in the software industry. One-third of our company is now permanently remote; our staff works as effectively as if they were in the office next door, and we’ve increased our pool of great employees around the country.”

According to Gartner, 40% of all enterprise workloads already deploy in the cloud. Businesses now consider analytics a mission-critical capability, and companies aren’t shying away from adopting data solutions.

Among upcoming business intelligence trends, we foresee a greater demand for industry-specific BI solutions in banking, manufacturing, healthcare, security services and many other industries. Amazon Web Services, Oracle and SAP, the leading industry giants, provide industry verticals with ready-to-go automation and customization.

You don’t need to create workflows from scratch, and customization enables greater control over how the application looks and works.

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2. Self-service BI Will Drive Data Literacy Initiatives

Companies understand that timely BI insight is critical to profitable business decisions. They want data to inform their every step — from project inception to completion. At the same time, they’re aware of the need to equip their employees with data querying and interpretation skills.

Self-service BI is an industry buzzword, driving the push for data literacy across industries as companies acknowledge the benefits of delegating BI tasks to employees. But beyond a mere buzzword, Brody sees this evolution as a necessary step.

“The democratization of data is critical. The design and execution of reports, data visualizations and analytics should not require a computer science degree.”

Out-of-the-box data connectors, intuitive interfaces and pre-designed workflows in enterprise BI tools let you do more without technical help. Certain BI trends like interactivity and augmented analytics add to the mix, supporting autonomous tasks like on-the-fly querying and ad hoc reporting.

Promoting a data-first culture demands a mindset shift and consistent organization-wide effort.

Per Brody, Exago was founded on data democratization and self-service reporting, though they never considered it like that at the time. According to Brody, some of Exago’s clients have tens of thousands of end-users, each with the ability to create reports and control their data.

“Ad-hoc reporting puts in the hands of the end-user the ability to not have to go through development. A non-technical end-user should be able to create their own reports.”

Among future trends in business intelligence, we foresee an increased enterprise push for data literacy with significant investment in self-service tools and techniques and employee training.

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3. Data Science Will Retain Its Niche Position

Self-service information discovery and data science roles overlap, spawning citizen data scientist roles.

Ryan Wilson, Vice President of Technology at Signal Ventures LLC, expects this trend of citizen data scientists to continue.

“What we’re starting to see is very business user-friendly business intelligence platforms that can be highly automated and are starting to incorporate some data science tools that don’t require a data scientist with a Ph.D. to utilize.

“This is going to lead to more and more companies incorporating data-driven business at every level of the business. As this happens I think we’ll start to see everyone becoming a bit of an analyst which will start to shift the role of a dedicated analyst to running, maintaining, and extending these platforms and tools in most organizations.”

Additionally, managers and CEOs will continue to seek out data scientists for complex calculations and predictive modeling.

Two heads are better than one. How about two departments are better than one? Cross-team collaboration is a significant BI trend, especially with remote work being the norm. BI software offering chats and comments within visualizations are in demand. Tools like ClickUp, Asana, Trello and Jira combine project management with business intelligence, chat and reporting.

4. Augmented Analytics and Automation Will Drive Delivery Pipelines

Forecasting business trends with predictive analytics is no longer restricted to data scientists, thanks to natural language generation (NLG), automation and machine learning (ML).

Automation is one of the most talked-about trends of BI, speeding up delivery pipelines as analytics scales up with increasingly complex data volumes. ML-driven algorithms are faster, providing automated responses to searches and triggering event-driven workflows. Everyone can perform data discovery and analytics with basic software skills.

No-code app development and integration is a market disruptor in interoperability, reducing the need to buy new functionality. Instead, your business systems can connect to software that delivers those capabilities at a fraction of the price of a new platform.

It beats building a software solution in-house when you want to hit the ground running.

Business intelligence derives from every conceivable information source, including webpage views, social media comments and connected networks and systems. Application integration brings it together, relying on APIs to shape analytics as we connect seamlessly to other BI, ERP and CRM systems.

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5. Embeddable Data Stories Will Push Insight To You

Data storytelling is among popular business intelligence trends as companies seek to utilize visual analytics to convey their message to stakeholders. Embedding data stories into client systems and web applications eliminates the need for time-consuming traditional reporting.

Data visualization tools and storytelling go hand-in-hand, with intuitive user actions and augmented analytics providing the necessary support. Scrolling actions, looping GIFs and animated 3D charts replace the need to tap on buttons or menus. Natural language insight gives it the human touch, making it easier to understand what you see.

According to data scientist and Chief Science Officer at DataPrime, Dr. Kirk Borne:

“It is a verifiable fact that dashboards are a key component of the business intelligence tools that an extremely large number of people use every day to do their jobs. This is not going to change simply because Jupyter notebooks are so much cooler, so much more flexible, and so data science-y. Dashboards are not dead. Yet.”

6. Natural Language Insight Will Help You Do More With BI

Natural language processing (NLP) is among the top BI trends currently, and it holds tremendous potential in the future of business intelligence. With NLP, getting information is as easy as asking, ” What were the sales figures for the North zone?”

Voice-activated searches make data discovery easier — it’s like talking to a colleague at work. Watch this SalesForce video to learn how BeyondCore embeds into Watson Analytics to provide natural language insight on demand.

Mordor Intelligence predicts the global NLP market will grow to $48.46 billion by 2026.

According to Dr. Borne:

“NLP applications are growing rapidly. These include: conversational AI (chatbots) in contact call centers and other consumer-facing engagements; unstructured text analysis (such as topic detection, sentiment analysis, document summarization, link analysis across document collections); and also in voice-assisted BI applications, including voice-driven dashboards and question-answering BI tools. I see a strong ‘friendly’ competition between computer vision and NLP to become the dominant AI application in organizations, which consequently will stimulate both of these AI technologies to greater adoption and into even more applications.”

NLP continues to mature in analytics, breaking down technical barriers for non-skilled users by allowing them to use analytics insights.

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7. Data Governance Will Be a Primary Ask When Seeking BI Software

Among trends in business intelligence, assigning dedicated data roles like that of data stewards is a significant move that can reap rich dividends. BI software with built-in role-based permission controls and authentication protocols is in demand.

A readymade governance framework helps secure data per industry standards. Strict oversight and penalties ensure organizations are serious about compliance, so it’s unlikely they’ll accept anything less when shopping for BI tools.

It impacts data quality management (DQM), which is paramount as user trust is everything. Your organization’s growth depends on your customers trusting you with their data. A Business Application Research Center survey shows that DQM with governance ranks in the top significant BI trends.

Straits Research predicts the global data governance market will grow to $11.68 billion by 2030.

Governance compliance is a legal mandate now, and BI tools with built-in access protocols will have the edge over those that don’t.

Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are significant because they enforce data protection rules and give you greater control over how third parties use your information. Governance is critical for industries that directly impact public health and safety, like financial services, insurance, healthcare and defense.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can access information easily, which is a weak link and requires greater oversight and accountability. It will be a challenge for software vendors and buyers as they attempt to bring AI-driven insight under compliance.

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8. Mobile Analytics Will Continue to Form a Significant Part of BI

Among trends of BI, mobile intelligence is a business-critical component of your data pipeline. Mobile insight includes audio, videos, images, text and streaming data, which contains priceless information. It gives product managers valuable insight into developing mobile applications.

While technical teams use it to optimize app performance, web designers create intuitive interfaces and user-friendly workflows from usage trends. Marketing teams use mobile BI to attract new leads, expand their user base and optimize the customer experience.

But capturing unique, accurate insight is challenging as your users switch between devices and towers. Multiple user touchpoints increase the risk of duplicate information, which can inflate the sales figures, giving you an incorrect picture. Additionally, ensuring compliance makes it a challenge for mobile BI vendors.

But, the value of mobile intelligence far outweighs these concerns, and companies will continue to seek BI software equipped with this functionality. When considering BI software, mobile data collection capabilities, SDKs, privacy compliance and integrations are likely to feature on enterprises’ requirements checklist.

Which trends in business intelligence do you foresee?

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To Wrap Up

As cloud computing overshadows traditional BI systems, vendor focus is on providing pre-packaged industry verticals with customization options. Self-service BI is trending, though expertise in data science is still a niche skill. Automation is here to stay, driving BI and analytics processes and freeing you for other tasks.

Embedding changed how we access information and will continue to impact BI software development and business insight. Data governance is the bull everyone wants to tame. Mobile insight forms a significant chunk of business intelligence, affecting how companies capture data.

Which trends are market disruptors in the future of BI? Did we miss out on any significant trends of BI? Let us know in the comments below!

Contributing Thought Leaders

Mike Brody is a serial entrepreneur, co-founder, and CEO of Exago Inc., maker of a web-based software solution that provides ad hoc reporting, dashboards and analytics. Since its inception in 2006, Mike has led Exago to its position as a self-funded and profitable player in the business intelligence software market.

Dr. Kirk Borne is a data scientist, Ph.D. astrophysicist and the Chief Science Officer at AI startup DataPrime. He is also the founder and owner of Data Leadership Group LLC and is a thought leader in data science, machine learning and AI across multiple disciplines. He has been a social media influencer since 2013, promoting analytics and data literacy for all.