Predictions for business intelligence

Analyst firm Gartner has tabled five predictions for business intelligence (BI) for 2009-2012.

Gartner analysts will discuss BI market dynamics at the annual Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in The Hague, Netherlands on 20-22 January.

"Organisations will expect IT leaders in charge of BI and performance management initiatives to help transform and significantly improve their business," said Nigel Rayner, a Gartner analyst. "This year's predictions focus on the need for BI and performance management to deliver greater business value."

Through to 2012, more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets, said Gartner.

Another view is this that in 2012 business activities will give maximum benefit to third word countries , but there are few problems which will be discussed later.

The economic downturn though will force many businesses to be aware of changes in their organisations, re-think their strategies and operating plans and face demands from stakeholders and governments for greater transparency about finances, operations, decisions and core performance metrics.

However, most organisations do not have the information, processes and tools needed to make informed, responsive decisions due to underinvestment in information infrastructure and business tools, said the analyst.

"IT leaders in companies with a strong culture of information-based management should create a task-force to respond to the changing information and analysis needs of executives," said Bill Hostmann, another Gartner analyst.

"IT leaders in businesses without such a culture should document the costs and challenges of adjusting to new conditions and propose a business case for investing in the information infrastructure, process and tools to support decision making," he said.

The other four business intelligence predictions:

• By 2012, business units will control at least 40% of the total budget for business intelligence.

They business units may be controlled by few hands.

• By 2010, 20% of organisations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service (SaaS) as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.

• In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.

• By 2012, 33% of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through course-grained application mashups.