Predictions: A Cynic’s Guide To BI In 2017

Businesspeople

• Businesspeople will be dissatisfied with their BI systems (this is “Timo’s First Law of BI”)
• Executives will refuse to learn to use any other data tool than Excel (and not even the newer features of that).
• No matter how good the BI system, businesspeople will make bad decisions based on gut feel.
• Executives will be completely unaware of data quality problems—unless their bonus depends on some value affected by it, at which point they will become experts.
• Businesspeople will find it hard to articulate what data they need—and then they will change their minds as soon as they get what they asked for.
• Some businesspeople will get fed up with corporate BI and take it into their own hands. They will build a loosely connected set of different technologies, resulting in huge maintenance costs and low compliance. They will then ask IT to take over the project.

IT

• IT teams will implement new ERP systems, then be surprised when businesspeople ask for analytics. Providing the analytics will require expensive changes to the ERP system.
• IT teams will struggle to build business cases for BI. But as soon as the businesspeople have access to the new data, they will change processes, create new opportunities, and save millions. They will take all the credit for this.
• “Download to Excel” will continue to be the most-requested BI tool feature. Users will complain when they are unable to download the entire corporate data lake to their PC.
• Data quality, data integration, and metadata will be the primary barriers to BI. But companies will continue to invest less in these areas than in shiny executive dashboards.
• New data sources will outpace IT’s ability to integrate them into core platforms (no matter what technology is used).
• BI competency centers will over-invest in technical skills and under-invest in training, communications, and community-building.

Analysts

• Some analysts will say BI and BI competency centers are dead, much to the confusion of the millions of people doing it every day.
• Analysts will say that there is only 15% penetration of BI. Nobody will understand where this number comes from and why it hasn’t changed in over twenty years.
• Analysts will say that data should be treated like an asset. Companies will not treat it like an asset.
• BI success numbers will be “calculated” using non-scientific samples of self-reported estimates without defining what “success” means. Analysts will say these numbers are too low, and that you need help from analysts to improve them.

The market

• Everybody will insist their definition of Business Intelligence/Analytics/Big Data, etc. is the only “correct” one.
• New analytics buzzwords will be coined. Thousands of articles will be written saying that the new buzzwords are meaningless and/or wrong.
• New BI startups will be created. They will claim to bring “BI to the masses” for the first time.
• Newer vendors will call the older vendors inflexible dinosaurs. Older vendors will call newer vendors immature and unsafe. Some newer vendors will suddenly realize that they are now considered the older vendors.