Top Five Business Intelligence Predictions for 2012

‘Tis the season for 2012 predictions and MDS Lavastorm Analytics is putting their stake in the ground. The company predicts a shift in the driver for analytics, moving from the current grip of the IT department over to the business itself. Opening up ownership of both the information and the process will provide organizations with added opportunities for growth, as different viewpoints and requirements inform data-discovery.

Click through for five business intelligence predictions for 2012, as identified by MDS Lavastorm Analytics.

Historically, IT has been in charge of creating analytic applications, reports and dashboards for people to use, but this process has been slow to address the rapidly changing needs of businesses, and a new paradigm is beginning to emerge – with analytical power and ownership shifting more to the business and away from IT. In the New Year, we’ll see an uptick in this shift, as IT groups recognize that they need to collaborate more with the business or risk getting left behind. In this same vein, the defined role of IT is changing from a mission of guarding the data to one of preparing the data for actionable business decisions. In 2012, this trend will continue and accelerate.

With ever-increasing reporting and auditing requirements, organizations will have to put more emphasis on processes and controls that build trust in their data and allow forensic analysis of business processes.  Data integration and manipulation accomplished through coding languages like SQL can lead to complex programs that hide the business logic and do not provide the transparency needed for decision makers to understand how results were constructed or whether they are accurate. In 2012, emerging analytical tools allowing data scientists to construct the same analysis in a visual way will increase in popularity, transforming the process from opaque and IT-centric, to transparent and traceable. This will allow IT and C-level executives to speak the same, visual analytics language, and increase organizations’ trust in their data and business intelligence decisions.

Increased awareness and acceptance of visual query tools will make the concepts of data exploration and discovery a much bigger part of any organization’s BI practices. With a common and more easily-understood data interface, analysts will no longer need to think of the “right” questions to ask before interacting with their data. Instead they can inspect data from all different angles, whether at an aggregate level or all the way down to the field level, to discover hidden trends and previously-unknown pieces of intelligence. Analytics will become less about updates to “known” questions, and more about organic discovery of the absolute most important piece of knowledge.

In the next 12 months businesses will place more emphasis on real-time data analytics, and subsequently be able to act on data points rapidly. As business intelligence and analytics systems become more integrated with enterprise systems and with business processes (as opposed to being offline processes looking at non-real-time data in a data warehouse), the time from a user’s data discovery to the changing of a business process will be shortened, enabling businesses to respond more rapidly to issues as they arise.

Big Data will remain a top buzzword for business in 2012, as people have realized that there is significant value in data outside the data warehouse. In 2012, however, Big Data analytics will reach a tipping point where it moves from a theoretical “science project” to an integrated part of the BI fabric of large organizations.