Global revenue in the business intelligence (BI) and market is forecast to reach $16.9 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.2 percent from 2015, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc.
According to Gartner, the BI and market is in the final stages of a multiyear shift from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to business-led, self-service . As a result, the modern business intelligence and (BI&A) platform has emerged to meet new organizational requirements for accessibility, agility and deeper analytical insight.
"The shift to the modern BI and platform has now reached a tipping point," said Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner. "Organizations must transition to easy-to-use, fast and agile modern BI platforms to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources."
The democratization of
Gartner says that as has become increasingly strategic to most businesses and central to most business roles, every business is an business, every business process is an process and every person is an user.
"It is no longer possible for chief marketing officers (CMOs) to be experts only in branding and ad placement," said Mr. Bertram. "They must also be customer experts. The same is true for the chief HR, supply chain and financial roles in most industries."
To meet the time-to-insight demanded by today's competitive business environment, many organizations want to democratize capabilities via self-service.
Defining the modern BI and platform
The most significant difference between a modern BI and platform and a traditional, IT-centric reporting and analysis platform is the amount of upfront modeling required, as well as the skills needed, to build content (see Table 1). Creating content via IT-centric reporting platforms starts with IT consolidating and modeling data in advance. By contrast, a modern BI&A platform supports IT-enabled development of content.
Table 1: High-Level Comparison of Traditional and Modern BI and Platforms
Workflow Component
|
IT-Centric Reporting and Analysis Platform
|
Modern BI and Platform
|
Data Source
|
Upfront dimensional modeling required (IT-built star schemas)
|
Upfront modeling not required (flat files/flat tables)
|
Data Ingestion and Preparation
|
IT-produced
|
IT-enabled
|
Content Authoring
|
Primarily IT staff, but also some power users
|
Business users
|
Analysis
|
Structured ad hoc reporting and analysis based on a predefined model
|
Free-form exploration
|
Insight Delivery
|
Distribution and notifications via scheduled reports or a portal
|
Delivery via sharing and collaboration, storytelling, and open APIs
|
Source: Gartner (December 2015)
"To get the full benefit of modern BI and platforms, leaders must rethink most aspects of their current IT-centric, centralized deployments, including technology, roles and responsibilities, organizational models, governance processes and leadership," said Mr. Bertram.
