In today’s highly competitive business the quality and timeliness of business information for an organization is not just a choice between profit and loss, it may be a question of survival or bankruptcy. No business organization can deny the inevitable benefits of BI. Recent industry analyst reports how that in the coming years millions of people will use BI visual tools and analytics everyday. Today’s organizations are deriving more value from BI by extending actionable information to many types of employees, maximizing the use of existing data assets.
Producers, retailers, governments, special agencies and others use visualization tools, including dashboards. More and more industry specific analytic tools will flood the market to do almost any kind of analysis and help to make informed decision making from the top level to the user level.
A potential trend involving BI is its possible merger with artificial intelligence (AI). AI has been used in business applications since the 1980s and it is widely used for complex problem solving and decision support techniques in real-time business applications.
It will not be long before AI applications are merged with BI bringing in a new era in business. To enable this integration, BI vendors are starting to use service oriented architecture and enterprise information integration (EII).
BI is spreading its wings to cover small, medium and large companies. Large BI players are for large enterprises and small, niche players service midsize and small companies. Analytics tools are also penetrating the market for very specialized functions, which will help some companies to go just for BA instead of full data warehouse based BI implementation.
BI takes advantage of already developed and installed components of IT technologies, helping companies leverage their current IT investments and use valuable data stored in legacy and transactional systems.