The Business Intelligence (BI) space has been around for well
over 20 years now. Over the last few years, the BI space has been
morphing and growing rapidly with new trends and best practices. Some of
these new trends and best practices will help drive success within an
organization; others will be “noise” and cost an organization time and
money. Here are the top three trends that we should look out for in 2019
to help drive success.
Artificial Intelligence
Lately, everyone in IT and outside of IT are talking about Artificial
Intelligence (AI). AI has become the latest hot topic. Studies have
shown that nearly 60% of businesses are looking to integrate AI, and by
extension machine learning, within their organization over the next
three years. Implementing a machine learning solution works best where
you clearly define the decision that must be made, use a limited number
of variables, and where errors can be quickly corrected to improve the
algorithm further. For example, “which of these bank payments
correspond to this invoice?” is significantly easier to implement than
“how can we improve long-term lung cancer survival rates?” You can use
AI to help improve long-term cancer survival rates, but you need to
clearly define your problem statement, hypothesis and control the number
of variables to ensure success and accurate reporting. Do be afraid to
start small and work up to “improving long-term cancer survival rates.”
Data Visualization
Data Visualization is more than fancy graphs and charts.
Visualizations are created to give business leaders a tool to monitor
the state of the business. These leaders need to be able to assess the
health of the organization quickly and to make decisions as appropriate
quickly. In order to meet these demands, the reporting layer needs to
focus on well-developed stories. A good data visualization story
integrates multiple data sets and allows the business leaders to
formulate deep insights to set the strategic direction for the
organization. Developing a good story is no easy task, but if you get it
right, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of your competition.
Data Governance
For the past several years, organizations have been shifting toward
self-service analytics. To better manage these self-serving
environments, companies are driving towards better data governance.
Setting up Data Governance best practices allow the business user to ask
and answer complex business questions while allowing them to find the
data they need when they need it. To set-up these best practices and
data standards, IT team members must partner with the key business
stakeholders. By partnering together, they will identify the data that
is most important to govern and create business rules that maximize the
value of analytics without compromising the data integrity.
Business Intelligence is no longer a nice-to-have asset for
organizations; it is a must. BI leaders are always looking out for the
best solution that adds the most value within a company. In 2019, BI
leaders should focus on Artificial Intelligence, Data Visualization, and
Data Governance to drive success. Now is the time to plan for 2019 and
identifying the success criteria in each of these categories to help
ensure that your organization is one step ahead of the competition.