4 Quora Insights on the Future of Business Intelligence

February 1, 2014

Ed Thompson, CTO

The future is hard to predict, especially when looking at the future of Business Intelligence, an industry and technology that have been fast-paced and innovative in the last few years.

There are, of course, many “thought leaders” who express their opinions and views and so to find a realistic idea of what lies ahead, we went searching on Quora – the question-and-answer website which is, self-proclaimed, “your best source for knowledge” to predict the future of Business Intelligence.

With more questions than we originally anticipated on the ever popular Quora, we have dissected four answers from multiple questions that we believe paint a good picture of the future of the BI industry.

One answer presented by Shash Hedge runs through the major trends expected to affect the future of BI.

Pulled from that list are Self-Service BI, Mobile BI, Visualization and Cloud BI. These are all trends we have seen affect the industry so far and Hedge expects them to shape the industry as more companies and users want to get data-smart.

Another answer that Hanan Taiber – an insurance BI specialist – states, are that three things must happen to make the future of Business Intelligence successful.

1. Simpler tools so more users can access information intuitively;

2. Targeting niche markets so that industry-specific tools cope with data complexity;

3. Self-service to allow people to become less reliant on IT departments.

Another Quora user, Elad Israeli, predicts that because of BI’s potential, the market could grow 10-fold. But to do this, Israeli suggests that BI needs to be made “approachable and easily deliverable to the mid-market” and that SaaS BI is one approach to achieving this.

An anonymous correspondent suggests that one major trend will be a web-based approach to BI. With a modern and easily extendable, lightweight option, he or she believes start-ups and emerging companies can offer a better solution at a more competitive price over the larger players.

To sum up, it seems that the general feeling on Quora when it comes to the future of Business Intelligence is that Self-Service BI will come to the fore and be more user-driven than IT-centric. Additionally, BI will be accessible to more companies as the delivery mechanism with Cloud and SaaS makes it more available.

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