How businesses are building futures with data analytics
How businesses are building futures with data analytics
IT Data Solutions
Business intelligence software is finding an intensified mission as companies try to forecast beyond the global Covid-19 health pandemic
There’s nothing quite like a bit of optimism. It can be infectious, at least in the hands of the right people. It was interesting to see some recent stats from McKinsey, showing how global executives currently have a fairly optimistic view of their local economies, despite the ongoing struggle with Covid-19.
More than half of all executives surveyed said economic conditions in their own countries will be better six months from now, and they were also upbeat on their own companies’ profitability. Clearly they must know something, or maybe they are just being bullish, talking it up and hoping for the best.
For any business, building forecasts demands something a little bit more than a hunch. Whether it’s an understanding of market trends and product performance analysis, or building intelligence on internal performance, businesses need facts, not subjectivity. This is where business intelligence (BI) comes in, and this also where it can get a little complicated. Not that it’s stopped CIOs from investing in new tools. According to the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO survey 2020, business intelligence (BI) is still a top strategic investment for businesses, with a quarter of CIOs surveyed claiming it sits in their top three most important tech investments.
There are multiple challenges facing any organisation that wants to embark on a BI strategy, but also those that already have a strategy and want to keep up with the pace of change. The fact is that the market has shifted quite dramatically since 2014, and this can impact any firm that backed one of the major players six years ago.
According to Gartner’s Magic quadrant for analytics and business intelligence platforms, the top four names today – Microsoft, Tableau, Qlik and ThoughtSpot – are out on their own. In 2014, the “leaders’ quadrant” was a much more crowded space, with IBM, SAS, Oracle and Tibco also pushing for market share.
Today, the likes of IBM and Oracle have become more niche, although Tibco is still regarded as a challenger, while Tableau, through its acquisition by Salesforce in 2019, now has more clout. It’s a less congested space at the top end but that doesn’t necessarily mean the choice is easier. Talking to CIOs it’s clear that there is no one-size-fits-all brand and that, despite huge progress in recent years, there are still notable gaps in capabilities, specifically around automation and AI/ML.
Expectations are also shifting. Qlik’s senior director of market intelligence Dan Sommer likens it to 2008-2009, when the company saw “a generational shift from reporting centric BI to analysis centric BI, with new requirements for agile, get-started-fast BI that sat closer to the business”. Today, Covid-19 is creating a similar shift, increasingly away from passive analytics towards more active analytics, where there is a need for a real-time data pipeline. Sommer reckons organisations will now be looking for analytics that can embed tactical actions into workflows, processes and moments.
