4 Ways Technology is Transforming IT Business Intelligence Strategies

Although business intelligence practices have dominated businesses for almost two decades, the practicing managers and BI advocates are still exploring ways to reduce technology costs and deliver more value. The truth is that the ongoing cost of maintaining legacy BI systems is increasing faster than total IT budgets. Thus, there is a tremendous pressure on businesses to modernize the BI infrastructure and tool set to remain efficient, effective, and competitive. In the recent, the four technologies that have made significant impact on the IT business intelligence practices are discussed here:

Big data enablement in BI

Scenario: CSC’s Business Intelligence Strategy and Transformation describes a communication equipment company, where information or insights drawn from it were found erroneous. As a drastic remedial measure, the company switched to a centralized reporting solution that displays a "single version of the truth," with clear and accurate reports. This is how big data enabled-BI saved the company serious expenses and embarrassment.

IDC expects big data revolution to grow up to more than $23 billion by 2016. An estimated 89% businesses accept the fact that without an advanced analytics strategy, businesses run the risk of losing the competitive edge!

The nagging data management problem in most businesses has been the apparent disconnect between islands of data with no centralized IT control. Thus, promising BI investments did not return the expected ROIs. Big data technology has suddenly made it possible for BI practitioners to develop agile and integrated BI frameworks where disjointed data pools are effectively integrated and cohesively analyzed for enhanced business decisions. Data discovery, deep learning, in-memory analytics, real-time, sensor-aided analytics, personalized customer experience, are all now possible in BI because of big-data.

Cloud for enterprise business intelligence

Scenario: 8 Big Trends in Big Data Analytics describes Smarter Remarketer, who provides retail analytics as SaaS, moved from an in-house BI infrastructure to the Amazon Redshift, the cloud-based data warehouse. This company delivers value-added business intelligence and analytics services for retail businesses in real time.

According to the latest industry outlook from Skyhigh Networks, the average financial services company uses more than 1,000 cloud services, to take full advantage of technologies like big data and Hadoop. As Brian Hopkins of Forrester Research rightly points that the future state of big data will be a hybrid of on-premises and cloud. It may be concluded that businesses cannot reap the full benefits of big data without Cloud, and vice versa.

But, security risks on the Cloud are still high, and there have been mixed response from the users in the financial sector regarding the security threats facing classified data. As per this Cloud Computing News article, The Cloud Security Alliance survey states that financial firms are still embracing cloud services in spite of security concerns. Cipher Cloud revealed 100% of users the finance space admitted to putting personally identifiable information in the cloud. So, the indication is that as sensitive data moves to the cloud, these companies must also meet strict regulatory requirements.

In What Is Driving Business Intelligence and Analytics in 2015, Garner states that a key topic at this year’s BI and Analytics Summit held in March-April was the cloud and its impact on BI because nowadays, every BI vendor is targeting the Cloud first.

Mobile BI for E-Commerce

A recent issue of BI Insights from Business Intelligence.com reports that Bank of America COE Brian Moynihan stated that its mobile customer base has increased by 2 million, touching 70 Million this year. Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase also reported massive expansions in mobile customer bases. The continuous rise of mobile customers in the banking industry throughout US, Britain (32.6 million by 2020 as per study by Fiserv), and in emerging markets like Africa, Kenya, and Bangladesh stress the need for mobile adoption in the business intelligences systems. Other industries like retail, finance, and healthcare are also rapidly gaining mobile customers.

Internet of Things for the Connected World

In an increasingly connected world, consumers are interested in quickly reporting anything and everything from medical conditions to shopping behavior data through sensors attached to different parts of their bodies. The "Internet of Things" technology is enabling fast data collection through these sensors, which can be analyzed and reported in real time. Industries like aerospace, oil, shipping, healthcare, and even retail have all been inspired by this "connected data network."

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