10 top analytics and business intelligence trends for 2019

10 top analytics and business intelligence trends for 2019

New data quality management practices, data discovery techniques and predictive and prescriptive analytics tools will be among the top 10 trends that will affect analytics and business intelligence initiatives for organizations in the new year.

10 top analytics and business intelligence trends for 2019

2019 will be “the year of data quality management and data discovery,” predicts the new report “Top 10 Analytics and Business Intelligence Trends for 2019,” just released from Datapine. Authored by Sandra Durcevic, the report says that business intelligence strategies will become increasingly customized, as “businesses of all sizes are no longer asking if they need increased access to business intelligence analytics but what is the best BI solution for their specific business.”

Data quality management

“Data quality management is not only uprising in the BI trends 2019, but also growing to a crucial practice to adopt by companies for the sake of their initial investments,” according to the report. “Meeting strict data quality levels also meets the standards of recent compliance regulations and demands. By implementing company-wide data quality processes, organizations improve their ability to leverage business intelligence and gain thus a competitive advantage that allows them to maximize their returns on BI investment.”

Data discovery

“Data discovery has increased its impact in the last year,” the report notes. “BI practitioners steadily show that the empowerment of business users is a strong and consistent trend. An essential element to consider is that data discovery tools depend upon a process, and then, the generated findings will bring business value. It requires understanding the relationship between data in the form of data preparation, visual analysis and guided advanced analytics.”

Artificial intelligence

“AI and machine learning are revolutionizing the way we interact with our analytics and data management,” the report says. “The fact is that it will affect our lives, whether we like it or not. We are evolving from static, passive reports of things that have already happened to proactive analytics with live dashboards helping businesses to see what is happening at every second and give alerts when something is not how it should be.”

Predictive and prescriptive analytics tools

"Predictive analytics is the practice of extracting information from existing data sets in order to forecast future probabilities,” the report explains. “Predictive analytics includes estimated future data and therefore always includes the possibility of errors from its definition. Predictive analytics indicates what might happen in the future with an acceptable level of reliability, including a few alternative scenarios and risk assessment. Predictive analytics goes a step further into the future. It examines data or content to determine what decisions should be made and which steps taken to achieve an intended goal. Prescriptive analytics tries to see what the effect of future decisions will be in order to adjust the decisions before they are actually made. This improves decision-making a lot, as future outcomes are taken into consideration in the prediction.”

Connected clouds

“Opting for a multi-cloud strategy … reduces risk and provides more flexibility—but such flexibility comes with certain costs, as you need several providers as well as training your teams to learn multiple platforms,” the report explains. “This is why multi-cloud is a debatable choice within companies, even though its adoption is clearly on the rise. Business will need to assess their needs and capacities of implementation, to evaluate whether it would be beneficial and profitable to go for a multi-cloud strategy.”

Data governance and trust

“In 2019, organizations will look to reinstate trust and reliability back into analytics practices,” the report predicts. “More collaborative processes will be created to help both IT teams and end-users agree and implement modern data governance models, maximizing the business value of analytics while not jeopardizing security. In order to improve business outcomes, organizations have started to view data governance as a necessity, but the lack of experience creates challenges into implementing and combining data quality, risk, ethics, privacy, and security to drive reliable business values, according to Gartner.”

Security—digital ethics and privacy

“Related to governance and trust, security is, without a doubt, one of the biggest business intelligence trends in the last few years. While the big companies make the news, concerns are also being raised over the vulnerability of small businesses. Database security has become a heated debate, both in the public and in private organizations. This will only pick up speed in 2019. Business owners will increasingly search for the most secure solution that averts the risk of data breach and losses.”

The growing Importance of chief data and chief analytics officers

“We can safely affirm that today, data and analytics are getting to the core of every business,” the report says. “Every company has had a chief information officer who supervised all the information management assets and security issues. But today, the data and analytics volume and role are getting so big that new positions are emerging: the chief data officer and chief analytics officer. Today, their roles have increased, and they have one of the toughest seats in the executive table.”

Collaborative business intelligence

“Collaborative information, information enhancement and collaborative decision-making are the key focus of new BI tools,” according to the report.” But collaborative BI does not only remain around some documents’ exchanges or updates. It has to track the various progress of meetings, calls, e-mails exchanges and ideas collection. More recent insights, like the one from SelectHub, predict that collaborative business intelligence will become more connected to greater systems and larger sets of users. Team’s performance will be affected, and the decision-making process will thrive in this new concept.”

Consumer experience

“Customer analytics and continuous experience will be one of the focus areas of business intelligence trends in 2019,” the report says. “Customer journey analytics, emotion detection, speech analytics, customer engagement center interaction analytics, analytics for customer intelligence—a lot of analytics awaits service leaders to visualize and connect the consumer journey across multiple devices and channels. By predicting customer behavior, the use of data will become an essential part of the consumer experience and formula to success.”