Every year software vendors, market analysts, and various IT pundits provide their lists of analytics trends. Here’s my list of analytics trends with ways to
Every year software vendors, market analysts, and various IT pundits provide their lists of analytics trends. Here’s my list of analytics trends with ways to produce more value for your organization from these trends.
Analytics concepts have been growing and maturing for a long time. Depending on how far back you want to look, William Playfair published the first business-oriented charts in 1785. Florence Nightingale produced ground-breaking medical cause-of-death charts in 1858. In the 20 th century, analytics research provided profound insights into how data is best presented for maximum impact and understanding. In this century, analytics concepts have been expressed in a huge variety of powerful, productive software packages.
It wasn’ t until more recently that the following trends coalesced so that analytics is becoming the new normal in many organizations:
Expect to see the number of analytics articles, webinars, conferences, software packages, and training offerings continue to grow. Build your expertise by spending some time exploring this rich analytics content.
Self-serve analytics has been a huge trend in recent years as end-users:
Self-serve analytics is beginning to encounter bumps on the road caused by end-users:
Expect to see more end-users recognizing that the IS department can contribute to delivering valuable and robust analytics applications after all. You can accelerate this trend by channeling the cynicism of Business Intelligence (BI) practitioners.
Business end-users are becoming less impatient, less critical and more understanding as they being to appreciate that the analytics they’ re asking for, while valuable, are not trivial to develop.
Data scientists are recognizing that the more arcane aspects of their profession may be confusing executives more than helping to deliver value from the available data. They’ re building more trust and credibility with simpler analytics.
IS staff is becoming less bureaucratic, less paranoid and more engaged as they begin to appreciate that they’ re not being asked to create a high-availability, high throughput, production-quality, custom analytics application based on requirements that are changing at least daily.
Expect to see more collaboration among these disciplines to deliver sophisticated and valuable analytics applications. You can nurture this trend by facilitating a more mindful dialogue.
End-user interest in and adoption of analytics is growing due to:
Expect to see most end-users acquire at least basic analytics literacy. You can encourage this adoption trend by strengthening best practices for data management and operating a center of analytics excellence.
Every vendor discusses their version of the analytics maturity model. For examples, click here to see the Gartner, IBM, Spotfire, and Tableau versions. These maturity models are often described to suggest:
While there’s undoubtedly more value in the later stages, I believe:
Expect to see organizations meandering through the maturity model stages at a more cautious, and perhaps uneven, pace to reduce risk of over-investment and failure. You can reinforce this trend by addressing the impediments to analytic value.
Initially, analytics applications sat apart from corporate applications even though they shared data and perhaps datastores. Analytics began this way because:
More recently it’s become apparent that embedding analytics into corporate applications can deliver immediate value. Analytics can indeed help line-of-business departments improve their performance.
Expect to see organizations pursue both analytics trends in parallel. You can strengthen this trend by:
What analytics trends are you observing? What developments would help you create more value from analytics for your organization?
