BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MODULE 5

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
BI(Business Intelligence) is a set of processes, architectures, and technologies that convert raw
data into meaningful information that drives profitable business actions. It is a suite of software
and services to transform data into actionable intelligence and knowledge.

BI has a direct impact on organization’s strategic, tactical and operational business decisions. BI
supports fact-based decision making using historical data rather than assumptions and gut
feeling.BI tools perform data analysis and create reports, summaries, dashboards, maps, graphs,
and charts to provide users with detailed intelligence about the nature of the business.

Why is BI important?

• Measurement: creating KPI (Key Performance Indicators) based on historic data Identify
and set benchmarks for varied processes.
• With BI systems organizations can identify market trends and spot business problems that
need to be addressed.
• BI helps on data visualization that enhances the data quality and thereby the quality of
decision making.
• BI systems can be used not just by enterprises but SME (Small and Medium Enterprises)

How Business Intelligence systems are implemented?

Here are the steps:

Step 1) Raw Data from corporate databases is extracted. The data could be spread across
multiple systems heterogeneous systems.

Step 2) The data is cleaned and transformed into the data warehouse. The table can be linked,
and data cubes are formed.

Step 3) Using BI system the user can ask quires, request ad-hoc reports or conduct any other
analysis.

Examples of Business Intelligence System used in Practice

Example 1:

A hotel owner uses BI analytical applications to gather statistical information regarding average
occupancy and room rate. It helps to find aggregate revenue generated per room.

It also collects statistics on market share and data from customer surveys from each hotel to
decides its competitive position in various markets.
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By analyzing these trends year by year, month by month and day by day helps management to
offer discounts on room rentals.

Example 2:

A bank gives branch managers access to BI applications. It helps branch manager to determine
who are the most profitable customers and which customers they should work on.

The use of BI tools frees information technology staff from the task of generating analytical
reports for the departments. It also gives department personnel access to a richer data source.

Four types of BI users

Following given are the four key players who are used Business Intelligence System:

1. The Professional Data Analyst:

The data analyst is a statistician who always needs to drill deep down into data. BI system helps
them to get fresh insights to develop unique business strategies.

2. The IT users:

The IT user also plays a dominant role in maintaining the BI infrastructure.

3. The head of the company:

CEO or CXO can increase the profit of their business by improving operational efficiency in
their business.

4. The Business Users”

Business intelligence users can be found from across the organization. There are mainly two
types of business users

• Casual business intelligence user

• The power user.

The difference between both of them is that a power user has the capability of working with
complex data sets, while the casual user need will make him use dashboards to evaluate
predefined sets of data.

Advantages of Business Intelligence

Here are some of the advantages of using Business Intelligence System:
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1. Boost productivity

With a BI program, It is possible for businesses to create reports with a single click thus saves
lots of time and resources. It also allows employees to be more productive on their tasks.

2. To improve visibility

BI also helps to improve the visibility of these processes and make it possible to identify any
areas which need attention.

3. Fix Accountability

BI system assigns accountability in the organization as there must be someone who should own
accountability and ownership for the organization’s performance against its set goals.

4. It gives a bird’s eye view:

BI system also helps organizations as decision makers get an overall bird’s eye view through
typical BI features like dashboards and scorecards.

5. It streamlines business processes:

BI takes out all complexity associated with business processes. It also automates analytics by
offering predictive analysis, computer modeling, benchmarking and other methodologies.

6. It allows for easy analytics.

BI software has democratized its usage, allowing even nontechnical or non-analysts users to
collect and process data quickly. This also allows putting the power of analytics from the hand’s
many people.

BI System Disadvantages
1. Cost:

Business intelligence can prove costly for small as well as for medium-sized enterprises. The use
of such type of system may be expensive for routine business transactions.

2. Complexity:

Another drawback of BI is its complexity in implementation of datawarehouse. It can be so

complex that it can make business techniques rigid to deal with.

3. Limited use
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Like all improved technologies, BI was first established keeping in consideration the buying
competence of rich firms. Therefore, BI system is yet not affordable for many small and medium
size companies.

4. Time Consuming Implementation

It takes almost one and half year for data warehousing system to be completely implemented.
Therefore, it is a time-consuming process.

Importance in business decision making interpretation of big data

To help you benefit from big data and business analytics, we asked business professionals and
leaders this question for their best insights. From assessing product fit to seeing the bigger
picture, there are several benefits you can gain from using big data for decision-making.

Here is what 7 thought-leaders had to say:

• Assess Product Fit

• Measure to Manage Better
• Craft the Right Story
• Identify Patterns
• Find New Opportunities
• Collect Customer Feedback
• See the Bigger Picture
• Assess Product Fit

Assess Product Fit

Understanding the current market trend, competitor analysis and knowing the product's current
stage in its lifecycle are the predominant decision-making strategies for an
organization's/product's success. Analysis of massive data using big data analytics aids to
forecast trends of customer behavior, markets, prices and so on. Business Analytics helps
organizations better adapt to the changing or upcoming competitive environments. Thus big data
and business analytics can help in improving decision making through the predictive analysis for
a perfect product-market fit.

Measure to Manage Better

In my field of marketing, business analytics and real-time data help marketers and business
leaders make decisions based on real-time campaign performance. Being able to quickly see
what campaigns are driving brand awareness, qualified leads for sales and customer conversion
helps marketers optimize campaigns to improve metrics and drive measurable business results.
This helps to reduce marketing spending by focusing on the right channels and tactics that are
driving optimal performance while improving overall ROI and revenue impact. Without big data
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and business analytics, marketing would be working in a silo instead of seeing how their
campaigns are impacting the bottom line.

Craft the Right Story

When you're faced with a challenge such as allocating budget, determining product features or
building a selling presentation for a customer, it's incredibly important to have the right data to
be able to do that effectively. Data can come in the form of case studies, projections based on
similar products and more qualitative measures such as market research studies. If you have this
data, you can craft stories such as "buying this product from us will increase your sales 15
percent". The sell story will only be convincing if you have the data to make the benefits clear to
the other party.

Identify Patterns

One benefit big data and business analytics can help improve decision making is by identifying
patterns. Identifying problems and providing data to back up the solution is beneficial as you can
track whether the solution is solving the problem, improving the situation or has an insignificant
effect.

Find New Opportunities

No matter how much you think you know, there is always more to discover. Big data and
analytics can help you make sense of where you stand and make better plans going forward.

Are you totally sure your marketing campaigns are as effective as possible? Is there an untapped
market for your product lines that you’re missing out on? With big data and business analytics,
you can plug holes in your strategy or find new opportunities to bring in more business.

Collect Customer Feedback

Big Data tools and analysis can help you collect customer feedback and make heads or tails of it,
and decide what to do about it. What if customers rate your products or services highly online,
generally expressing satisfaction, but aren’t returning for more? Big Data can help you comb
through their opinions and observations to figure out why and if such trends are limited to one
region, sector or demographic. Using this information, you can redirect if needed.

See the Bigger Picture

In the day to day running of your business, it’s often the case that you can’t see the forest for the
trees. It’s natural, as you have a lot to focus on. Big data can help you see the bigger picture and
business analytics can help you figure out what it all means. With all of the information gleaned,
you can bolster your decision-making with hard facts to back it up.
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BUSINESS AND COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Business Intelligence (BI) and Competitive Intelligence (CI) are both critical for improving the
performance and success rate for your organization. While both are different in practice, when
put together, they are an equation for business success. Business Intelligence focuses more on
internal strategies, where Competitive Intelligence allows businesses to focus on what’s
happening outside the four walls of a company.

Both Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence have similar frameworks for success.
Business Intelligence starts with collecting data from internal sources, then integrating
information into one centralized location, analyzing your findings, and finally acting upon what
you’ve found. Competitive Intelligence follows a framework that looks very much like a BI
process. For Competitive Intelligence, you start with capturing data from external sources,
followed by an analysis of your findings, ending with acting upon your findings.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is inward facing and has been practiced for years. Business intelligence is
the process of gathering data about your business from a multitude of sources and centralizing it
so that you can analyze it, and ultimately, make decisions that will benefit the growth of the
company. The goal of business intelligence is to comb through data and make decisions to
implement new or improve upon existing initiatives and strategies that will make your business
more efficient.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

Your entire organization can benefit from Business Intelligence. Your business likely has
multiple data sources that hold valuable intelligence for each of your teams. Here is how each
team within your organization can benefit from Business Intelligence data.

Benefits for Product Marketing:

Product marketing can improve many parts of its strategy with business intelligence. Most
importantly, PM can improve product launches and sales enablement activities, and better target
their ideal customers. To do so, Product marketing needs to analyze what has been done in the
past such as product launches, campaigns, and win/loss analysis, and take into consideration
what worked and what didn’t when planning future initiatives.

Benefits for Marketing:

Your marketing team can get a deeper understanding of how their campaigns are performing,
blog post metrics, and overall site traffic. By getting a better understanding of these marketing
metrics, your marketing team can figure out where to invest more time, which campaigns to
continue, and which pieces of content to promote more.
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Benefits for Sales:

For sales organizations, business intelligence is extremely beneficial. By diving into sales
numbers, you can get a better understanding of which deals close the fastest, average sales cycle
lengths, and which reps are performing the best. With this data, you can better train your sales
team and enable them to close more deals.

Benefits for C-Suite:

Your C-Suite wants to know everything that’s happening in the trenches of your company.
Business intelligence can help your c-suite make informed decisions about processes,
investment, hiring, and greater business decisions.

Benefits for Product:

Your product team can gather a lot of valuable information using business intelligence. Your
product team can analyze overall product usage, feature adoption, and see your most active
users. This can help your product team when it comes to building out the next phases of a
product, and it can help identify power users, which can be beneficial when it comes to Beta
testing future versions of your product.

Benefits for Human Resources:

Your HR department can analyze your past employees and current employees as well as your
culture overall. Some valuable pieces of intel for HR are salaries, how long an employee stays,
why an employee leaves, and how your culture has changed over time. By looking at these
pieces of information, your HR team can ensure they are creating a strong internal culture and
making your business a place that people want to work.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is outward facing, and a relatively new business strategy that has been
adopted more during recent years. Competitive intelligence is the process of gathering data about
your competitors, understanding key information, and using your findings to anticipate your
competitors' next move. CI allows you to better understand your competitive landscape and
improve upon your own internal initiatives. Ideally, a strong competitive intelligence strategy
will allow you to gain full insight into what your competition is doing and make predictions on
where they are moving next.

Benefits of Competitive Intelligence

Much like Business Intelligence, every team within your organization can reap the benefits of a
successful competitive intelligence strategy. Without a deep understanding of competitive
intelligence, it's sometimes believed that CI only benefits your sales team. However, there are
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benefits beyond sales for product marketing, marketing, product, your c-suite, and your admin /
human resources teams.

Benefits for Product Marketing:

Competitive intelligence can help product marketers in many ways. By taking a look at what
your competition is doing, as well as conducting research among your target audience, product
marketers can enhance messaging and positioning, create winning sales enablement tools, and
execute successful product launches that stand out and address the market’s needs.

Benefits for Marketing:

Marketers can drive a lot of value from competitive intelligence insights. Marketers can take a
look at competitors’ content strategy, campaigns, social media posts, SEO rankings, and events
that the competition is attending. By analyzing your competitors' marketing efforts, you can
incorporate your findings into your own strategy, and find new ways to differentiate yourself
from the competition.

Benefits for Sales:

Sales needs competitive intelligence to successfully do their job because, without it, they will
have a hard time winning those competitive deals. With the help of CI through tools such as
battlecards or SWOT analyses, sales teams can better position themselves against competitors
and win more competitive deals.

Benefits for C-Suite:

By keeping a pulse on your competition, your C-Suite can stay on top of funding
announcements, partnerships, and can track overall market standing. This will help them make
decisions about where your company can go next when it comes to funding, partners, and the
general strategy for company growth.

Benefits for Product:

Product teams benefit immensely from keeping a pulse on competitors’ products. With the help
of resources such as competitive matrices and third-party reviews, your product team can see
where you stand within the market. In addition, your product team can take market feedback and
competitor updates, and use those findings to iterate on your own product.

Benefits for Human Resources:

With the help of CI, your HR team can better attract and retain talent, build a positive company
culture, and offer competitive salaries and benefits. It’s not a common use case, but HR tracking
your competitors' team and culture insights is a great way to maintain a competitive edge within
your industry.
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Although these two business strategies are practiced differently and impact different parts of
your business strategy, when put together, they can ensure success. You can stay on top of your
own growth as well as keeping track of your competition, making you the ultimate market
leader.

WHAT IS BUSINESS ANALYTICS?

Business analytics (BA) is a set of disciplines and technologies for solving business problems
using data analysis, statistical models and other quantitative methods. It involves an iterative,
methodical exploration of an organization's data, with an emphasis on statistical analysis, to
drive decision-making.

Data-driven companies treat their data as a business asset and actively look for ways to turn it
into a competitive advantage. Success with business analytics depends on data quality, skilled
analysts who understand the technologies and the business, and a commitment to using data to
gain insights that inform business decisions.

How business analytics works

Before any data analysis takes place, BA starts with several foundational processes:

• Determine the business goal of the analysis.

• Select an analysis methodology.
• Get business data to support the analysis, often from various systems and sources.
• Cleanse and integrate data into a single repository, such as a data warehouse or data mart.

Initial analysis is typically performed on a smaller sample data set of data. Analytics tools range
from spreadsheets with statistical functions to complex data mining and predictive modeling
applications. Patterns and relationships in the raw data are revealed. Then new questions are
asked, and the analytic process iterates until the business goal is met.

Deployment of predictive models involves a statistical process known as scoring and uses
records typically located in a database. Scores help enterprises make more informed, real-time
decisions within applications and business processes.

Types of business analytics

Different types of business analytics include the following:

descriptive analytics, which tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand the present
state of a business;

predictive analytics, which analyzes trend data to assess the likelihood of future outcomes; and
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prescriptive analytics, which uses past performance to generate recommendations for handling
similar situations in the future.

A diagram outlining the difference between predictive, descriptive and prescriptive analytics,A
diagram outlining the difference between predictive, descriptive and prescriptive analytics

Some schools of thought also include a fourth approach, diagnostic analytics, which is like
descriptive analytics. It analyzes the state of a business and diagnoses why certain events or
outcomes happened.

Business analytics vs. business intelligence

The terms business intelligence (BI) and business analytics are often used interchangeably.
However, there are key differences.

Companies usually start with BI before implementing business analytics. BI analyzes business
operations to determine what practices have worked and where opportunities for improvement
lie. BI uses descriptive analytics.

In contrast, business analytics focuses on predictive analytics, generating actionable insights for
decision-makers. Instead of summarizing past data points, BA aims to predict trends.

The data collected using BI lays the groundwork for BA. From that data, companies can choose
specific areas to analyze further using business analytics.

Business analytics vs. data analytics

Data analytics is the analysis of data sets to draw conclusions about the information they contain.
Data analytics does not have to be used in pursuit of business goals or insights. It is a broader
practice that includes business analytics.

BA involves using data analytics tools in pursuit of business insights. However, because it's a
general term, data analytics is sometimes used interchangeably with business analytics.

Common challenges of business analytics

Businesses might encounter both business analytics and business intelligence challenges when
trying to implement a business analytics strategy:

Too many data sources. There is an increasingly large spectrum of internet-connected devices
generating business data. In many cases, they are generating different types of data that must be
integrated into an analytics strategy. However, the more complex a data set becomes, the harder
it is to use it as part of an analytics framework.
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Lack of skills. The demand for employees with the data analytic skills necessary to process BA
data has grown. Some businesses, particularly small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), may
have a hard time hiring people with the BA expertise and skills they need.

Data storage limitations. Before a business can begin to decide how it will process data, it must
decide where to store it. For instance, a data lake can be used to capture large volumes of
unstructured data.

Roles and responsibilities in business analytics

Business analytics professionals' main responsibility is to collect and analyze data to influence
strategic decisions that a business makes. Some initiatives they might provide analysis for
include the following:

• identifying strategic opportunities from data patterns;

• identifying potential problems facing the business and solutions;
• creating a budget and business forecast;
• monitoring progress with business initiatives;
• reporting progress on business objectives back to stakeholders;
• understanding KPIs; and
• understanding regulatory and reporting requirements.

Business analysts must have a mixture of hard and soft skills. A business analyst does not need a
deep understanding of IT but does need to understand how systems work together. Some
business analysts choose to move from an IT-centric role into a BA role.

When recruiting for these jobs, employers typically look for the following capabilities:

• ability to perform cost-benefit analysis;

• familiarity with process modeling;
• understanding stakeholder analysis;
• analytical problem-solving;
• oral and written communications skills;
• a basic understanding of IT systems, including databases;
• detail-oriented;
• experience with BA tools and software; and
• ability to create visual representations of data.

BI capabilities in business solutions

1. Data Collection and Analysis
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All BI software capabilities, functionalities and features focus on data. But first, that data has to
be collected. This is done through a variety of web traffic monitoring actions like social media
tracking. BI tools do this by utilizing algorithms to quickly sort unstructured data, cutting out
duplicate entries and errors as it goes. Then, once it has turned the raw, unstructured data into a
structured data set, it can analyze that data.

After collection and organization, BI software develops and runs queries against data sets in
order to draw actionable insights from the chaos of unstructured data. Then those insights can be
presented in data visualizations like charts, graphs, infographics, dashboards and animations.
These visualizations make the analytical results easy for the human mind to process and
understand, which helps organizations make data-driven decisions.

2. Data Lineage Tracking

Like I mentioned earlier, we create an unfathomable amount of data every day. Understanding
how that data is created, how it moves and what becomes of it is crucial to properly utilizing it.
Data lineage is a process that tracks data from its origin to wherever it moves over its lifetime.
Tracking data lineage creates a complete, ongoing record of system activity as it undergoes
various processes — think of it as a thumbprint. It can be represented visually to follow its
movement from source to destination in order to help organizations understand how different
data points changed and why. This BI capability is especially crucial when dealing with Big
Data.

Another use of data lineage tracking is to follow the process backwards, starting with end results
and following the data back to its source. By standardizing the methods for retrieving and
tracking data, organizations can save themselves time and money — not to mention headaches.

3. Interactive Data Visualizations

This is the core of our business intelligence capabilities list. Both business intelligence and
business analytics — a subset of BI — offer a range of data visualization capabilities to
transform the chaotic sets of unstructured data into vibrant visuals that communicate meaning.
These visuals can range from bar and pie charts to scatter plots to engaging interactive
animations.

4. Cloud Deployment

Deployment refers to the method in which the software is implemented — the typical options are
on-premise, cloud/web-based or hybrid. While many industries have been reluctant to leave on-
premise-based deployment models, cloud-based is quickly becoming the predominant option.

In SelectHub’s recent survey of BI software buyers, 23 percent of respondents firmly preferred

cloud-based deployment. Of the 69 percent who were on the fence, 10 percent leaned towards
the cloud.
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So we know the cloud is up-and-coming — but why? Cloud-based deployment offers a range of
benefits that are too sweet to pass up. First, it allows complete customization in terms of size,
storage, functionality and access — in a word, scalability. This is a significant advantage which
allows you to minimize or expand your system according to your business needs.

Cloud-based deployment is also generally cheaper than on-premise solutions. You can buy only
the number of licenses you need and don’t have to worry about the hardware or IT support of
running the software on your premises. Most cloud-based software comes with comprehensive
support from the vendor to help keep you up and running.

5. Customer Service

Speaking of getting help, BI solutions offer a range of customer support options. Whether it’s
live chats, phone support or email correspondence, most BI provides some form of help desk
support. This allows you to quickly and thoroughly address any issues that arise during daily
operations and get back to business.

When implementing BI, make sure to take advantage of any on-site training options as well as
the virtual libraries of training materials many BI vendors supply. Most include a set support
package with your purchase and charge extra for additional training.

6. Integration

Integration is the ability to cooperate and communicate with other systems. These can be
anything from websites to email to your CRM. BI integrates and works with your existing
infrastructure, including 3rd-party data warehouses, internal SQL server configurations and other
data sources.

Full integration also means data processes are intuitive, simple and easy to deploy through your
system’s dashboards and collaboration platforms. Find out which integration features are
important for your company using our interactive requirements template.

7. Reporting

Through business intelligence, you have the ability to generate accurate and thorough reports on
any facet of your business’s data. For example, self-service BI allows users to generate reports
on financials, goal management, productivity and customer service data to help in many areas of
the decision-making process. These reports are intuitive and richly visualized, which means that
all levels of staff can understand the information and act on it.

Users can also run customized reports on industry-specific KPIs to glean valuable insights from
their data. One type is an ad-hoc report, which is a highly-targeted, single-use report. These are
particularly useful for a number of day-to-day tasks — for example, if a user wants to identify
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specific demographics of a set region for sales numbers. Users can specify and zoom in as deeply
as they like to get an in-depth understanding of their business operations.

8. Dashboard Management

Dashboards are what you would get if data visualization and task management systems had a
visually interactive, workflow-streamlining baby. Dashboard software works on the principle of
data visualization: it makes Big Data results “digestible.” It takes the raw data and presents it in a
way that allows for actionable results. This makes it a core part of greater enterprise software
systems that are aimed at delivering insight and decision support to a business.

The dashboard feature can also be assigned to task management functions. By offering
employees a common interface to perform tasks, interactive dashboards ensure easy
collaboration and increased productivity. In this survey by SelectHub, dashboards were the most
frequently requested feature by BI software buyers: a resounding 90 percent of respondents
wanted this capability.

9. Intuitive Use

The only thing worse than not having BI software is having it and not knowing how to use it.
While training videos and on-site visits from vendors can go a long way to achieving successful
implementation, a software system with an unintuitive UX isn’t going to perform as well and
may leave users frustrated. This hurts productivity, morale and your overall business
performance. Plus, it’s one of the main causes of incomplete or improper BI software
implementation.

10. Decision Services

This is a lesser-known business intelligence capability that can really pack a punch. First, some
BI systems offer a financial management module for tracking and visualizing your organization’s
funds. Business intelligence can help users develop strategies for financial health and growth by
predicting future scenarios based on gathered data. In the present, users can generate financial
reports, spot financial anomalies and monitor funds.

Another of BI’s capabilities comes in the form of promoting security. This is done through a
combination of targeted data monitoring activities. Some offer integrated apps that ensure
compliance with regulatory standards, acts and policies by monitoring user activity. This
promotes fraud detection from within as well as without as the system monitors data points for
suspicious activity.

11. Workflow Collaboration

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again — work smarter, not harder! BI software allows you
to do just that by promoting collaborative and streamlined workflows throughout your
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organization. You no longer need to hire an analyst or outside consultant to study your data —
anyone within your organization can create and share information like never before.

12. Predictive Analytics and Modeling

Predictive analytics refer to a group of analytical capabilities that predict future trends and
scenarios from historical data. BI extracts this information by analyzing a vast set of data,
ensuring reliable and usable information.

Predictive analytics is one of the most valuable features of BI software. This capability allows
your business to predict market trends, staffing needs, sales, profits and losses, to name just a
few. Implementing these features can seem daunting, so here are some tips for getting the most
out of your predictive analytics software.

13. API

API, or application programming interface, is a set of subroutines, tools and protocols for
building software. Basically, it’s a language that lets different software systems communicate
with each other. With an API, business intelligence software pushes application data directly into
your data set. In short, this makes it incredibly easy to integrate and use new functions and
capabilities into your existing BI solution.

RECENT TRENDS IN BI
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 the company falls along this
continuum, one of the key technology enablers helping companies steadily navigate this
unexpected change and ensure business continuity is business intelligence (BI).

1. Cloud analytics

The digital revolution 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. Today, depending on the budget, security and
compliance, hardware, and other factors, analytics can be flexibly deployed on public, private,
hybrid, multi, or community clouds, or also 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. Some of the hottest additions and consolidations are
happening in the data preparation layer. This helps enterprises connect, explore, transform, and
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enrich their data for analysis. This list of additions is becoming a native part of the BI workflow,
which includes data integration, preparation, management, and insights. Yet another layer,
perhaps the most popular, that has recently joined the BI full-stack approach is AI/ML, which
will redefine self-service analytics and make the intelligence program widely accessible within
enterprises. Add automation capabilities to this mix and organizations will find themselves with
a complete, powerful BI program that can run on auto-pilot and empower teams to quickly make
data-driven decisions.

3. Augmented analytics

The rapid adoption of technologies and applications is creating multiple points of consumption
for analytics. For instance, the evolution of natural language query(NLQ) capabilities into
immersive conversations has driven up the adoption of BI among business users; and delivering
in-context analytics is eventually 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. Decision intelligence is also gaining
momentum in the business world. This strengthens the framework for decision-making best
practices, which aids the application of machine learning at scale. These act as 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.

4. 360° 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. Native app integrations and advancements in prebuilt, domain-
specific data models can help businesses 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 also becoming simpler and faster with auto modeling and blending
capabilities. This is paving the way for real-time, cross-functional analytics that provide 360°
business insights.

5. Data storytelling

The ROI and utility of dashboards are under attack! Businesses are looking beyond primitive
structuring 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

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Modern self-service BI and analytics platforms are engineered to keep a close watch over KPIs.
The intelligence built into these platforms can smartly analyze data, proactively spot outliers,
flag critical changes in KPIs, etc. With companies adopting more business applications with
contextual integration capabilities, 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. 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 low code / no code 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.