Welcome To the Next Generation Of Business Intelligence
The Business Intelligence (BI) industry has long promised a future where every worker can use data to make smarter business decisions. Although that promise continues to be out of reach for most companies, the industry has come a long way over the past few decades, and we believe we are on the cusp of a new generation of BI that will finally turn that promise into reality.
Business Intelligence is built on an old data culture that relies on technical experts. In the early days of reporting, those experts were called IT. As technology evolved and tools became easier, the progression of BI moved to reports and dashboards delivered by new experts—analysts.
This made analytics more accessible, but still didn’t make self-service data insights a reality across the business. Here’s why: Instead of using technology to put data in front of people where they already are working, we continue to ask people to leave their business apps and turn to dedicated tools or dashboards for answers. This process is disruptive and inefficient, and often causes users to write it off completely. Dashboards don’t have built-in analytics processes; they share information but do not provide recommended courses of action at the right moment or in a decision maker’s workflow. Business professionals want exactly that: They want a final answer and recommendations on what to do next. They would rather have data and actionable insights come in easily digestible bites versus needing to dig for answers in dashboards and reports. And the truth is they are digging; dashboards are often too broad to address multiple questions, too difficult to customize, and frankly, have too many insights.
For analytics to advance, we must extend dashboards or deliver personalized intelligence to more decision makers. In fact, experts predict that “dashboards will be replaced with automated, conversational, mobile and dynamically generated insights customized to a user’s needs and delivered to their point of consumption. This shifts the insight knowledge from a handful of data experts to anyone in the organization.” Now, instead of wasting time jumping from where the data resides (in dashboards) to where work is done, embedded analytics enables users to do both simultaneously: get insights and take action.
Internet: <www.forbes.com> (adapted)