This article will discuss the year ahead of us, specifically in terms of what 2016 holds for Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management for modern businesses.
Another year has come and gone, seemingly faster than ever – and we’re already into the second month of 2016. At the end of 2015 or in early January, some people were writing about Business Intelligence (BI) and Corporate Performance Management (CRM) trends they predicted we would see manifest this year. However, much like my current approach to New Year’s resolutions, I felt it was important to let the dust settle, work through the workload hangover of the holidays, and have the New Year function as a soft opening. This way, we can approach 2016 with a rolling start that doesn’t set us up for failure. This article will discuss some key trends and trajectories that data management and analytics will take in 2016.
In both BI and CPM realms, data is king – and has been for some time, but it just continues to grow in size and significance. And it’s truly no longer something that has to be organized, refined, and analyzed by the IT team as a gateway or additional step to get into the hands of business decision-makers. Moreover, self-service analytics has been consistently growing in popularity all along, but as it becomes the marketplace norm, the product offerings have and will continue to evolve. With the business end user/consumer in mind, self-service BI will come in the form of modern, intuitive platforms and applications that are easy-to-navigate, but advanced in terms of output. Financial reporting, budgeting, and dashboards will be richer and more robust, but we’ll see more quickly digestible, easy-to-understand analytics as that’s what business end users/consumers are seeking.
How is “quickly digestible” delivered in the form of BI or CPM products? In 2016, we’re going to see data visualizations compete with financial reporting to be the cornerstone of the analytical landscape. Customizable, advanced data visualizations, or dashboards, will be on the rise, as they are a favorite among executive teams, as well as extremely accessible for business end users at all levels of an enterprise. Businesses of all sizes will start or continue to move away from analysis that is purely based on traditional reporting with rows, columns, cells, and hard figures toward their data visualized in ways that are immediately recognizable in terms of trends, opportunities, and challenges, with the ability to drill down into the facts and figures – no matter the platform or the device.
In regard to platform, BI and CPM will officially start to really take off in Cloud or browser-based systems. There was some hesitation from consumers in the business world, perhaps related to the concern of having some, if not all of their data sources on-premises. In addition to the concern of managing both on-premises and Cloud/web-based solutions, there was a specific confusion and apprehension to security, particularly in the context of a hybrid approach. However, independent software vendors (ISVs) have heard this concern and done the work of making it 1) secure and 2) trustworthy, from product engineering to marketing.;
