2014 Business Intelligence Trends

Our Data & Analytics Consultants made a couple predictions for 2014’s  Business Intelligence trends after looking at this year’s BI trend thus far:

  • With many BI projects failing to realize expected ROI, business managers will increasingly rely on proven BI expertise, often from the outside consultancies.
  • Simple to install (or reliable cloud base), simple to use, and reasonably priced BI tools (like Tableau) will continue to drive complex and expensive BI infrastructures out of companies.
  • Excel will continue to dominate self-service BI market in 2014. With a broad install base, Microsoft has a chance to significantly improve its BI reach beyond Excel. Power BI is a very promising solution, though it still needs a bit more work to improve business user friendliness, ease of deployment, and cost structure (Read more about Microsoft Power BI in an earlier buzz post here).
  • With high-profile data breaches and revelations regarding spying, companies will become increasingly more sensitive to safeguarding their data.
  • “Big Data” will continue to be a hype for companies that continue to struggle to effectively manage internal “small data”.
  • Microsoft BI Stack will continue to dominate Seattle area in 2014, with Tableau quickly taking market share from other BI players (including Microsoft).
  • While the demand for highly skilled Data Scientists (think PhDs in math) will continue in 2014, companies will become more demanding of their data scientists to produce findings with a measurable return on investment (ROI).
  • Users will become more comfortable with less precise data as long as the data allows to identify sentiments, “general directions,” and trends.
  • Traditional IT Development efforts in BI will see their focus shifting further away from building a single, ‘golden’ source of data in the data warehouse (or collection of data marts) towards simply better integrating and preparing of data for Data Scientists and self-service users.

Compare and contrast our predictions with other industry authorities:

What do you think will be the Business Intelligence Trends of 2014? Weigh in with a comment!