While many businesses are still reeling from the events of the past two years, some are managing to meet and outperform expectations. Irrespective of where your company falls along this continuum, one of the key enablers helping companies steadily navigate this crisis is business intelligence.
That’s why we’ve put together a list of the top 7 BI trends we think can help you have a successful 2022.
1. Cloud analytics
The digital exodus of 2020 and 2021 is here to stay. By moving data to the cloud, companies have enhanced access to data to maintain collaboration and productivity amidst a distributed workforce.
In order to garner actionable, timely insights from that data, companies are harnessing the power of cloud analytics. Business and BI vendors are bringing BI closer to data to drive business efficiencies.
Depending on the budget, security and compliance, hardware, and other factors, analytics can also be flexibly deployed on public, private, hybrid, multi, or community clouds, or as microservices. This will further propel the adoption of cloud analytics.
2. Unified data management and analytics
The ingenious unification of the BI stack has transformed reporting/visualization applications into modern BI and analytics platforms. (read more about data management).
Some of the hottest additions and consolidations are happening in the data preparation layer. Data integration, preparation, management, and insights are becoming a native part of the BI workflow.
The AI and ML capabilities infused into the BI stack will continue to redefine self-service BI & analytics. Automation will further democratize and simplify BI and analytics for all.
3. Augmented analytics
The rapid adoption of technologies and applications is creating multiple points of consumption for analytics. Delivering in-context analytics is emerging as a vital functionality for BI vendors. To address this, analytics platforms now embed AI and ML capabilities across multiple points in any business workflow for contextual insight discovery.
The evolution of NLQ capabilities into immersive conversations is further driving the adoption of BI among business users. These advancements will further open up possibilities in the area of search-driven analytics.
Decision intelligence is also gaining steam in the business world. These are enablers that complement decisions made by humans. One such enabler is automated insights. It tops up visualizations with insights in the form of narratives, giving more firepower for better decisions.
The implementation of self-learning and deep-learning ML models across the BI workflow will make artificial intelligence smarter and more scalable.
4. Unified business analytics
With the adoption of more business apps across companies, BI platforms are becoming more data agnostic, and are expanding their stable of business app integrations. This is also creating opportunities for data integrators.
With native app integrations and advancements in prebuilt, domain-specific data models, businesses can get to insights faster, without having to build reports and dashboards. These models can also be trained to address specific business needs.
Analyzing complex datasets is becoming simpler and faster with auto modeling and blending capabilities. This is paving the way for real-time, cross-functional analytics that provides 360° business insights.
5. Data storytelling
The ROI and utility of dashboards are under attack! Businesses are looking beyond primitive capabilities to have data and insights presented without bias, and with proper empathy and context, so that teams can make more informed decisions.
BI vendors are also exploring ingenious ways of demystifying complex KPIs and humanizing data interactions. Some of these consumerized insight delivery experiences are in the form of presentations, purpose-built portals, documents, and much more.
These dynamic insight delivery mechanisms are becoming even more immersive and interactive with the augmentation of AI.
6. Business activity monitoring
Modern self-service BI and analytics platforms are engineered to keep a close watch over your KPIs. The intelligence built into these platforms can smartly analyze your data and proactively spot outliers, flag critical changes in KPIs, and a lot more.
With companies adopting more business applications, BI platforms can deliver key data alerts in the context of any application’s workflow, without having to log in to the analytics app. This reduces the time to respond, enabling businesses to act on alerts instantly.
As an extension to the traditional BI workflow, some modern analytics platforms are built to trigger actions in the context of insights. Going forward, with the augmentation of AI and ML capabilities, platforms will be able to intelligently decide the necessary actions to be triggered based on insights, as they happen.
7. Embedded BI
Apart from independent software vendors and business consultants embedding BI into their applications, markets are witnessing an uptick in businesses natively embedding BI into their existing applications meant for internal consumption. This is made possible through composable analytics that harness LCNC capabilities to create user-focused apps from existing assets.
BI vendors continue to enhance their API stacks consciously, making them more robust for shorter development cycles, with more prebuilt and reusable components and less hand coding. This also enables teams to build functions based on business needs.
With the gaining popularity of infused analytics, B2B applications will deliver a more natural analytics experience as part of their workflow. This will cut down the number of applications used for analyzing data by delivering an in-context, all-in-one analytics experience.
Summary
Given the never-ending need to analyze data, investing in BI and analytics is increasingly becoming a must for businesses around the world. In this context, it’s crucial to keep a finger on the pulse of the market to understand the latest developments.
These trends can be your baseline while embracing BI and analytics or evaluating vendors for your analytical needs.
As one of the earliest adopters of these technologies, Zoho Analytics as a powerful business intelligence software is transforming the way businesses make data-driven decisions. The phenomenal response to the launch of Zoho Analytics as a modern self-service BI and analytics platform reassures us that our investments and resources are aligned with the needs of today’s modern businesses.
Sign up and explore how Zoho Analytics can help your business.
Watch our video on the top 7 BI trends in 2022!
Thanks for the informative post. The way you narrated the post is good and understandable. After reading the post I learned some new things about business intelligence trends. Keep posting. Please let me know about the upcoming posts.
Nice work