Over the last decade, the business intelligence world has transformed in several ways. Data exploded and was recognized as the new oil. Organizations understood the value of data and shifted from simple spreadsheets to interactive BI dashboards and visualizations. We also witnessed several challenges including transforming data into actionable insights, ensuring data quality, being compliant with emerging regulations like GDPR and shortage of talent. In spite of all these challenges, companies have been striving hard towards making data work.
In 2020 and beyond, we can see companies further their push towards creating a culture of data by utilizing several emerging technologies in AI and beyond. In the middle of a torrential amount of data, companies will have to ensure they are maximizing business value from data while maintaining data compliance and management systems.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the top 8 business intelligence trends for 2020.
1. Augmented Analytics
Augmented Analytics sits at the top of technology trends that will reveal its disruptive potential in BI over the next three to five years, according to Gartner. “By 2020, augmented analytics will be a dominant driver of new purchases of analytics and business intelligence as well as data science and machine learning platforms,” the research firm stated. The global augmented analytics market, which will grow at a CAGR of 25.2% over the next six years, is expected to reach $22.4 billion by 2025.
This technology automates the process of extracting vital insights and makes it available to all business roles using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Augmented analytics enables organizations to get consistent and accurate data with minimal manual intervention in lesser time. It also augments data preparation and discovery processes.
Augmented analytics also enables the emergence of citizen data scientists and frees up non-business users such as analysts, data scientists and internal IT staff to focus on complex tasks and solving strategic issues. This would enable business organizations to optimize performance and drive productivity.
2. Augmented Data Management
In 2020 and beyond, all efforts will be made by organizations to automate data management tasks. This will allow businesses to fill the gap created by the exponential growth of data and critical talent shortage, and also maintain data quality. Technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence will be utilized to spearhead the augmented data quality and master data management processes within organizations.
3. Data Discovery
A prevalent 2019 business intelligence trend that will also dominate 2020 is data discovery. The adoption rate of data discovery has steadily increased over the last few years.
Data discovery tools provide automated suggestions, generate unknown findings, and spot hard-to-find business trends.
The primary reason for this huge shift in BI towards data discovery is that it goes beyond traditional static reports and presents actionable insights and outliers in a visual and easy-to-understand format with interactive navigation. Essentially there are three facets to data discovery:
- Data preparation: Connect internal data and external data. Ensure data quality.
- Visual analysis: Interactive visualizations to help users easily spot trends.
- Guided advanced analytics: Statistical data which enables users to perform more sophisticated data analysis.
4. Focus On Generating Actionable Insights
This trend is about bridging the gap between data and business value. AI would transform the traditional BI solutions into actionable intelligence solutions. In 2020, companies in data-driven industries like CPG, retail, banking, insurance etc. would rely on machine learning, AI and NLP to transform raw data into real-time meaningful insights.
5. nurturing a data-driven culture
Building a data-driven culture across the whole organization will be one of the top priorities for BI professionals and business managers going into 2020.
“By 2023, data literacy will become an explicit and necessary driver of business value, demonstrated by its formal inclusion in over 80% of data and analytics strategies and change management programs,” according to Gartner.
Developing a data-driven culture would require consistent investment of time, money and effort. It would require leadership buy-in and support, in particular. But implementing the data culture across departments can prove to be beneficial across the board in the long run.
The absence of data-informed decision-making could negatively impact the key business KPIs of an organization. By creating a data culture, the employee mindset will change, data will be stored in cloud, competitive edge can be achieved and operational costs can be reduced.
6. Conversational Business Intelligence
In 2020, AI and NLP-powered digital assistants will define the new wave of BI. Research shows that natural language processing and conversational analytics will not only augment the adoption of business intelligence but also become a standard feature of 90% of modern BI platforms by the end of next year.
Business Intelligence chatbots will help business users to access data and report via chat. They can have natural language conversations with the chatbot like “what is my sales in 2018”, “What is marketing expenditure in 2019” or “Send me revenue report from 2009 to 2019.” They don’t have to undergo the hassle of logging into their BI systems, switching dashboards or filtering data everytime to access data.
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7. Diversified Data Jobs
With the democratization of data and the global surge in data, human insight will become even more important in BI. As a result, 2020 will create data-related jobs across enterprises.
Be it project manager, data ambassador or data translator or AI specialists, the demand for skilled work-force is set to increase in the coming years. Companies would actively seek and invest in employees with data science and analytics skills to fill the talent gap.
8. Agile BI Development
This approach involves using agile software development methodologies to reduce the time-to-value of traditional BI, improve the outcomes of BI initiatives and adapt to the changing demands.
Compared to traditional BI methodologies, the agile BI approach allows enterprises to keep pace with the changing demands of the market by combining new and emerging technologies and architectures.
Closing Thoughts
In the last decade, many organizations have clearly realized that data is the new oil and that they can’t survive in the market without leveraging data. In 2020 and beyond, we can see organizations adopt several emerging trends across the technology, process and people aspects of BI. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our business intelligence consultants.
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