Gartner coined the term BI to refer to analytical desktop tools. Over time the industry views BI as extracting, aggregating and analysing data to provide the right information to the right people at the right time.
As a $50b market place growing 15% per annum, customers are finding that BI has become vital to their ability to stay competitive.
There are a lot of trends in BI, but the three core trends that are impacting businesses are:
- Explosion of data – estimated to double each year
- Need for BI for the masses – not just C level execs and business analysts; it’s for every person in the organization that has to make a decision
- More complex questions – driving increasingly more sophisticated analysis of data
In turn, this means that more and more businesses need to know a whole lot more about business intelligence, and how it will transform their business processes, decision making, profitability and competitiveness.
BI is no longer a ‘nice to have’ – it’s a critical business capability.
BI is not a technology – it is an evidence based decision support system usable by 95% of the organization.