And for good reason. Customers are using BI tools and analytical software to shorten development cycles, flatten business hierarchies, improve customer retention, overhaul supply chains and strengthen decision-support systems.
We interviewed numerous market experts to pinpoint six key BI trends. Analyse the clues and the opportunities outlined below, and you may succeed in the BI market long before your competitors join the data chase.
Trend 1: More data in more places
Yes, customer data is increasing exponentially. Brian Brinkman, a senior product manager at MicroStrategy, sees some customers whose data doubles yearly.
In fact, we'll generate more information over the next three years than was created in the previous 300,000 years, according to the school of information management and systems at the University of California, Berkeley.
As the data piles up, the hurdles to business analysis rise even higher. Before you can analyse the data, you've got to find it and make sure it's valid--or help your customer do it for themselves. "The wider business community has the same problem that analysts have had for 20 to 30 years--getting ahold of the data and getting it into a format that's useable," notes Mark Battaglia, president of SPSS BI.
Mike Hoskins, president of Data Junction, has a slightly more colourful way of describing the problem. "Data is unruly. Data is never in the format or form that the project architect requires, that the business-intelligence application requires, that the e-marketplace requires. Furthermore, data fights being captured, tamed and corralled. And every time you think you have it penned, a new format, or application, or schema, or business requirement bullies its way on the scene."
What it all means
To get started in BI, get familiar with extract, transformation and load tools. Be sure to approach problems from multiple angles--perhaps a supplier couldn't get a crucial part shipped in time, which means that your client couldn't ship the final assembly. Think about looking for supporting data (in the form of transaction logs or other less-structured formats) from different systems in a variety of locations.
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