The Real BI Trends in 2017

The IT industry and the world at large have always been subject to technology and business trends, sometimes undergoing major changes, such as the development of the personal computer, client/server computing and the evolution of the Internet.

Over the last few years, new trends have emerged that have had an enormous influence on how organizations work, interact, communicate, collaborate and protect themselves. Eight IT ‘meta-trends’influence organizations’ strategies, operations and investments in a wide variety of ways:

• Digitalization
• Consumerization
• Agility
• Security
• Analytics
• Cloud
• Mobile
• Artificial Intelligence

These meta-trends can be considered as the main drivers behind a number of important trends either related to the usage of software and technologies for business intelligence/analytics (BI) and data management or to the way BI is organized. They generally shape the future of business intelligence and – more specifically – the BI and data management trends we analyzed.

BARC’s BI Trend Monitor 2017 reflects on the business intelligence and data management trends currently driving the BI market from a user perspective.

In order to obtain useful data for the BI Trend Monitor, we asked almost 2,800 users, consultants and vendors for their views on the most important BI trends. Their responses reveal a comprehensive picture of the future of BI as well as regional, company and industry-specific differences, delivering an up-to-date, objective perspective on the business intelligence market.

The Most (and Least) Important BI Trends in 2017

Data discovery/visualization, self-service BI and data quality/master data management are the three topics BI practitioners identify as the most important trends in their work.

At the other end of the spectrum, data labs/data science, cloud BI and data as a product were voted as the least important of the twenty-one trends covered in BARC’s survey.

This shows that ‘hyped’ topics or initiatives in early-moving companies cannot win a greater mindshare as important business intelligence trends than more mainstream topics like data discovery and self-service BI, or fundamentally important topics that have been around for a while like data quality and master data management.