by Angela Guess
Brian McKenna reports in Computer Weekly, “Gartner predicts worldwide business intelligence (BI) and analytics sales will reach $16.9bn in 2016, as buying shifts from IT to self-serving business people in organisations. This is an increase of 5.2% from 2015, according to the firm. The company reckons corporate organisations are in the last stages of a ‘multiyear shift from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to business-led, self-service analytics’. Ian Bertram, managing vice-president at Gartner, said: ‘The shift to the modern BI and analytics platform has reached a tipping point. Organisations must transition to easy-to-use, fast and agile modern BI platforms to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources’.”
McKenna goes on, “Gartner believes business professionals outside the IT function are taking charge of BI. Bertram said chief marketing officers (CMOs), for example, ‘must also be customer analytics experts. The same is true for the chief human resources, supply chain and financial officer roles in most industries’. The firm said the shift from BI reporting centred on IT to self-service BI replaces the need for upfront data modelling. IT still has a role preparing and ingesting data for consumption by business users, said the firm. But ‘structured ad hoc reporting and analysis based on a predefined model’ will be replaced by ‘free-form exploration’. Gartner said the shift means a fundamental change on how companies and organisations prepare for BI and analytics.”
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