I had the honor of presenting an Americas SAP User Group (ASUG) session on the latest big trends in BI & Analytics at the SAPPHIRENOW SAP User Conference this week in Orlando, Florida.<\/p>\n
As usual, it was a real challenge to try to fit everything I’d like to have covered in under an hour —\u00a0to give you a flavor of the talk, here’s some notes on the first section concerning the top trends.<\/p>\n
Analytics is as hot as ever!<\/strong> When you look at Gartner\u2019s list of the top strategic trends for 2017 you can see that \u201cintelligence\u201d is at the top of the list, including machine learning, intelligent apps, and intelligent things. And according to Gartner\u2019s long-running annual CIO survey, BI & Analytics is yet again the top priority, as it has been for ten out of the last twelve years!<\/p>\n Digital transformation = analytics.<\/strong> One of the reasons that Analytics remains a hot topic is that the amount and variety of data available has skyrocketed, constantly creating new analytic challenges. But even more importantly, analytics has become an essential part of digital transformation.<\/p>\n For the last few decades, we\u2019ve typically thought of business intelligence as a byproduct of our operational processes. In other words, we manufacture products, and ship them around the world, and sell them to customers. Each of these processes generates a lot of data, and we use that data both to keep track of operations and to create more optimized processes in the future.<\/p>\n This remains as true and important today as it\u2019s ever been in the past. But now there\u2019s another dimension coming into play. Organizations are increasingly realizing that digital transformation doesn\u2019t just require new processes \u2013 it requires a new approach to implementing<\/i> processes. They have to be more agile, more intelligent, and more responsive to change.<\/p>\n These new processes flip the traditional equation on its head. New processes are created on the fly<\/i>, powered by analytics. The typical customer journey is a great example. Think about how you purchase a product today. In the old days, it was a fairly linear process, that companies characterized as a \u201csales funnel\u201d. But now it\u2019s more like a \u201cwrite your own adventure\u201d book \u2013 where there are many different possible interaction paths, and at each point in the process, you as a customer get to choose the next chapter. Analytics is being used to help the customer make the right choice at each point \u2013 \u201cwhat other products might you be interested in?\u201d or \u201cWould a discount get you to purchase right now?\u201d \u2013 in other words, every \u201ccustomer process\u201d is unique, we can let analytics do all the work, creating thousands or millions of personalized \u201cprocesses\u201d based on the needs of each individual.<\/p>\n Because these new processes are analytics-powered, they can be much more agile and responsive to change \u2013 indeed, new machine learning approaches mean that they can update themselves.<\/p>\n Effectively creating and managing these kinds of flexible, on-the-fly processes is THE big new opportunity in digital business. But it also means that analytics has to have a more process-oriented approach, not just treated as a series of one-off decisions. SAP has always been a leader in traditional processes, and we\u2019re now hard at work extending our leadership into these new digital transformation processes.<\/p>\n Gartner believes that information and analytics will be used to reinvent, digitalize, or eliminate 80% of today\u2019s business processes. Analytics is no longer just an afterthought to the \u201dreal business\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s a the heart of the new business models of the future.<\/p>\n The problem with analytics.<\/strong>\u00a0While analytics is a hot topic, it doesn\u2019t mean that everything is roses. Various reports indicate that the reported success rate of BI deployments has stalled. It\u2019s not completely clear what BI \u201csuccess\u201d really means \u2013 very few organizations actually define what success would look like before they start on a projects. But I believe that numbers remain low because even though BI technology continues to improve, business expectations have risen even faster.<\/p>\n The penetration of BI remains low, with 55% of organizations reporting less than 20% of their staff using BI — but the good news is that user adoption grew noticeably in all sizes of organization over the last year.<\/p>\n Users of enterprise analytics complain that it\u2019s too slow, with almost a third having to wait days or weeks for a BI request. And in theory, people should be able to access information themselves without needing IT, but a third said that they find their enterprise BI too complex, too complicated, and too cumbersome to use. Finally, and most importantly, over half the data that business people want to access is now from outside the organization, and is therefore unlikely to be in the corporate system in the first place.<\/p>\n The number one thing that organizations give themselves low marks on when implementing BI projects is “people” and “process” — changing culture is much harder than implementing technology. At the recent Gartner Data & Analytics event in London, fully 85% of the audience agreed with the statement \u201cThe most significant internal roadblock that I face in my role is culture and change management\u201d — and the SAPPHIRENOW audience agreed!<\/p>\n Taxis vs Uber.\u00a0<\/strong>From the point of view of business users, traditional analytics organizations look like the taxi companies that have been displaced by more flexible car-sharing applications like Uber and Lyft. People always found taxis too expensive, and annoyingly hard to find when you wanted one \u2013 but there was no alternative, so they put up with it. Uber came along using all the new technologies to provide a much easier, more seamless experience. But the taxi companies complained that they were breaking all the rules.<\/p>\n We’re seeing something similar inside organizations, as traditional business intelligence teams try to adapt to the rise of self-service “modern BI” tools. There are now lots of powerful, lightweight analytics products available, and business departments increasingly have their own IT budget to spend. The result it that the older ways of doing things are being disrupted, and just like the taxi companies, outright resistance is both futile and bad for customers. Traditional analytics organizations have to adapt to the new tools and new ways of working.<\/p>\n Other sections of the talk included an introduction to “Modern BI<\/strong>“, the need for decision processes<\/strong>, the transformation of analytics through predictive and<\/strong> artificial intelligence<\/strong>, the latest trends in effectively staffing and organizing\u00a0analytics initiatives<\/strong> in organizations, and a bonus section on the trends in big data architectures<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Slides from my session on the latest big trends in BI & Analytics at the SAPPHIRENOW SAP User Conference +ASUG Annual Conference this week in Orlando, Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[100,125,160,213,384,398,942,1082],"class_list":["post-13588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences","tag-analytics","tag-asug","tag-bi","tag-businessobjects","tag-digital-business","tag-disruption","tag-sapphirenow","tag-transformation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/sapphirenow-asug-bi-disruption.jpg?fit=1000%2C558&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3xa","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20535,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13588\/revisions\/20535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}