Emerging technologies will soon marginalize IT's role in BI

According to a study by Gartner, most business users are avoiding BI. Gartner predicts that the role of corporate IT units in business intelligence will become increasingly marginalized in the future as emerging technologies allow individual users and business units to build their own analytic applications.

What went wrong?

BI tools tend to be analytic tools designed for professional data analysts and statisticians. As a consequence, business users find it difficult to use and understand. This is quite ironic! After all, BI is implemented mainly for business users. But they are not finding it useful. Poor insight into user requirement has led this odd situation!

What is the alternative?

Business users are not trained to be statistical analysts. They tend to have interests on non-statistical information. For example, executives and managers are more concerned with verbalized information than statistical charts. They need information more readily applicable in business decisions and actions. In reality, typically business applications consist of many pre-defined reports. They deal with specific needs of day-to-day business operations. Many of them are custom-developed. Knowledge-enhanced predictive reports can improve both analytical sophistication as well as business visibility.

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