The future is here: 5 business intelligence trends to look out for

The business industry has constantly undergone developments, as innovation is what brought us to the current technology solutions. Still, as customers’ needs are changing, companies must find better approaches to satisfy any demands. Therefore, enterprises have recently used a new strategy called BI (business intelligence) for data analysis and management purposes, but it comprises many other elements.

BI is one of the latest ways for a business to discover new insights and become more proactive. It has been proved that using BI can improve productivity and increase profits by completely understanding customers and making correct predictions. Still, the strategy’s potential can be unleashed in the future, bringing more value to a company.

Let’s see what the current trends of BI are.

The elements of the future of business

As BI is slowly integrated into companies’ platforms and practices, we learn that the basis of such a method incorporates a few standard fundamentals of business:

• Collaboration between BI tools to facilitate teamwork;

• Integration of BI with third-party systems to simplify data processing;

• Machine Learning is used to analyze past data and provide insight into forecasting;

• Data proactivity will focus on bringing relevant data to users and automatically responding to inquiries;

• Network advancements to expand storage for large amounts of data and support BI systems;

• Data-driven culture will become the new company culture, helping employees to incorporate BI onto everyday processes;

Even if today BI is increasingly adopted by companies, its growth will feature more user-friendly software options and drive a more knowledgeable user base. In the meantime, let’s discuss today’s trends on BI.

Data Governance

In any company, data is the most valuable asset. But with all the technological development, storing and analyzing it has changed drastically in the past 20 years. Lately, data privacy and security have become more demanding, and businesses might find it challenging to keep up with all regulations. This can be an issue for bigger enterprises because they need to make sustainable efforts to classify data to support the increasing analytics initiatives.

Therefore, data governance will address the issue of understanding the information requirements of each business to improve data quality while ensuring privacy and confidentiality. By allowing organizations to use the right data guide through a BI decision-making system, companies could benefit from balanced data consistency and transparency that will improve business outcomes.

Self-service BI

Customers and users have become increasingly demanding businesses to provide access to the data they need. They wish for a specialized tool to ensure the right value of the product they need, which can offer them the power to use and trust their preferred brand. Therefore, the self-service aspect of a business will help businesses become self-sufficient and eliminate the need to rely on IT or data teams, which will speed up the decision-making process.

If it sounds unobtainable with our current technology systems, know that even if it’s not that easy to adopt, this strategy can boost your company like no other. Supposing that you and your team would need a little more insight into this new concept, you could hire futurism speakers to learn more about future probabilities of businesses and endorse digital transformation into your company culture.

Prescriptive Analytics

In businesses, the concept of predictive analysis is already used for extracting information from existing data sets to forecast future possibilities. But prescriptive analysis does more than that by providing the means for analyzing the data to determine the necessary steps the company needs to take to achieve a specific goal.

Such a tool allows companies to adjust their decisions before the actual implementation. This way, the improvement of decision-making actions will minimize the risks and provide more safety in new performances. In the near future, more organizations will use prescriptive analysis to get insight into possible situations, available resources and past performances to make the best decision on the following action. They will also better understand worse-case scenarios and choose to base their strategies on highly analyzed facts.

BI and NLP

NLP (natural language processing) is a branch of computer science, and it represents the human strive to create machines that understand and respond to text or voice data. Such technology combines computational linguistics with machine learning and statistical learning models. It’s a system already integrated into GPS systems, digital assistants and customer service chatbots. But what would happen if we merged NLP with BI?

Businesses aim to pursue a more significant advantage in the future, so besides merging these technologies in the customer area, the planned consolidation of these elements could be done to make BI-based data more accessible by enabling non-technical users to connect to data effortlessly. Or, it could help companies analyze customer sentiments and abstract information to determine the positive (or negative) view around a certain product.

End-to-end BI solution

As discussed before, businesses that hold enormous amounts of data might struggle to access it or get insights from it. But with an end-to-end BI solution, they can access consultants and data architects who can manage and govern it. At the same time, such a system will help them organize and analyze the growing volume of data to present it to users through intuitive dashboards and reports.

This method is similar to the XaaS model (anything as a service) that describes a certain category of services related to cloud computing and remote access. It is used to recognize an enormous number of products, tools and technologies delivered to users as a service. Although it’s similar to the BI solution regarding the shift from IT resources, it has its limitations that BI can cover (complexity impacts and performance issues).

Final thoughts

Business intelligence tools are here to stay. They’re constantly improving and aiming to provide better services and deliveries to customers, which is what businesses need the most. BI encompasses Machine Learning and network advancements to work towards getting a deeper insight into what the clients need and what approach is best for maintaining a considerable amount of data.

What do you think about these innovative ideas?

Cynthia Madison is a young blogger and economics and marketing graduate. She writes about home, lifestyle and family topics and is a senior contributor to popular niche publications.