The industry giants – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, and Oracle – are still leading in the global analytics market shares. Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle are additionally outperforming the market for all other vendors. However, it’s interesting to note that the battle among the top analytics vendors is not over “sophisticated algorithms,” but over Data Quality.

Here are some current business intelligence and analytics trends:

• Self-service business intelligence has become even more democratic with collaborative BI tools
• The current generation business intelligence (BI) platforms are delivering mobile analytics on the go
• COVID-19 has pushed a significant percentage of software vendors to cloud adoption. Cloud-SaaS adoption is also expanding
• Artificial intelligence has become mainstream this year with natural language processing (NLP) gathering steam
• Global businesses have been asked to focus on Data Literacy programs and data-driven cultures
• Due to strict data regulations, businesses are currently prioritizing Data Governance and data security.

This DATAVERSITY® article gives a quick review of the BI and analytics trends list from 2020.

Below are the Business Intelligence and Analytics Trends in 2022.

Trend 1: Data Literacy

Businesses have realized the value-added benefits of data-driven decisions and data-powered, actionable intelligence. Now they want to empower all levels of their organization with powerful Data Literacy programs, so that business users are able to make informed decisions in their daily work lives without the help of IT or Data Science teams.

The Data Literacy initiatives in businesses, slowly gathering momentum this year, will receive much more attention in 2022. This Inside Indiana Business story explains why Data Literacy is important for data-driven cultures in enterprises.

Trend 2: Data Quality Management (DQM)

Data Quality plays a key role is ensuring the accuracy of analytics insights. Bad data can lead to incorrect insights, which in turn can result in bad business decisions. So, what is good data? Good quality data is usually accurate, consistent, complete, timely, unique, and verified.

Data Quality Management (DQM) is still the primary differentiator of a good BI platform, and DQM-linked business processes guarantee a business’s compliance with global Data Quality (DQ) and Data Governance (DG) standards.

Trend 3: Collaborative BI

Social media channels and interactive websites have prompted businesses to quickly collect customer data, customer preferences, and customer sentiments. When such powerful data work is in conjunction with advanced (collaborative) BI tools, collaborative BI is in action.

Collaborative BI is fast becoming a trend because it facilitates quick data collection, fast decision-making, and report sharing. Collaborative BI promotes collective problem-solving and free business discussions via web 2.0 platforms.

Trend 4: Embedded Analytics

According to Allied Market Research Report, the global embedded analytics market has been projected to reach US$60 billion by 2023. Embedded analytics, by virtue of being “resident” within native applications, enables speedy data analysis without any data movement from one software environment to another.  

Trend 5: Widespread Cloud and SaaS Adoption

In 2021, more and more businesses have migrated to either hybrid cloud or public cloud and have started subscribing to Software as a Service (SaaS) plans for outsourced BI services.

The cloud BI concept has gathered so much steam that 95% of software vendors have voted for it, and 54% of enterprises consider cloud BI “very important” for their businesses (Dresner’s 2020 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Market Study).

For global businesses opting for cloud BI, here are the major advantages:

• Cloud-hosted data is accessible on any device on any location
• Totally outsourced maintenance and upgrade services (stress-free)
• Data security, backup, and recovery services included
• Cloud offers easy scalability and flexibility of services
• Simple Data Management processes for business clients
• Low cost of ownership but high efficiency for business clients

Here is a McKinsey Insights about how CIOs and CTOs can accelerate cloud adoptions for data processing services. This informative article guides readers on how to prioritize and align technology investments around a cloud-based operating model.

Trend 6: AI Integration in Mainstream BI

There has been a surge in AI investments across businesses in the U.S., with other parts of the globe gradually following this trend. A PWC survey indicates that 86% of survey respondents stated that AI would be a mainstream technology at their company in 2021.

AI technologies have penetrated every facet of the business today—whether it’s a recommendation engine, automated data preparation, augmented analytics, or neuro-linguistic programming-guided reports. AI has truly democratized Data Science activities.

An IBM whitepaper discusses how analytics and BI are taking shape in the age of automation. The common belief is that very soon, “intelligent computer systems” are destined to replace human workers in many sectors—which is already happening in financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare.

In the AI-powered analytics and BI world, business users will query data to validate a machine-generated insight or they may even accept the machine insight as an actionable intelligence.

Trend 7: Automation in Analytics and BI

In 2020, 64% of large organizations used AI to automate data analysis, which is a significant rise from the 2019 figure of 55%. Automation is vital for large scale analytics projects, where manual labor will lead to inefficiencies and wasted efforts. In such cases, the human staff will be more useful as data-driven decision-makers.

The biggest benefit of automation is processing speed, which is critical for business survival. This Outlier.ai page explains how AI-powered BI can help uncover real-time insights and patterns. According to author Kaycee Lai, augmented analytics will transform analytics and BI workflow.

Trend 8: NLP-powered BI

NLP eliminates the need for a “translator” between the human language and machine language. BI vendors in recent years have integrated NLP in their solutions.

In an NLP-powered BI system, users can query their BI platforms in plain English. NLP is designed to make BI systems more accessible to non-technical users. Natural language generation (NLG) provides the output in conversational language—thus enabling BI tools to answer questions or explain key findings in an understandable language.

TechTarget handbook explains how NLP has evolved as a core communication tool in BI and analytics solutions since 2020.

Trend 9: Telling a Story Through Data

Along with data visualization, sharing a data story with other business users is also an important activity in today’s competitive business world. Current BI platforms include storytelling and advanced visualization tools, which allows information to turn into a captivating story.

Information with narratives built around it is much more likely to catch the viewer’s attention and get immediate results than drab numbers and statistics. This blog post compares data visualization with data storytelling. Data storytelling will play a critical role in collaborative BI in 2022.

Trend 10: Mobile-Friendly BI

COVID-19 has further accelerated the move toward mobile-friendly analytics and BI platforms. Now, worldwide businesses want their staff and customers alike to be able to access their business platforms from remote locations whenever they want.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the mobile BI market will exceed $20 billion by 2024. Mobile devices like smart phones and tablets “are estimated to comprise more than 72% of internet traffic,” so it makes good business sense to deploy mobile-friendly BI platforms across the organizations.  

While business analytics is maturing in terms of business penetration and capabilities, the demand for “good data” will continue to rise throughout the next five years. In the future, BI will move to the cloud, but that trend will bring many unanswered questions about data privacy, security, and data leakage.

What Does the Future Hold for Business Intelligence and Analytics

Going by the current shifts in BI trends, it is probably safe to assume that electronic communication modes like social, mobile, and web will become mainstream in business analytics of the future. Virtual analytics—analytics conducted in a “virtual environment”—will experience huge growth in the next few years.

Image used under license from Shutterstock.com