Business Intelligence is Still Important

At the end or beginning of each year journalist often write articles predicting events or trends that will emerge during the upcoming year. It is fun to go back to these articles and see how accurate they were.

I came across an article today that was written this time last year predicting the top business intelligence trends for 2013. The seven predicted trends were:

1. Expansion and evolution of dashboards
2. Improved self-service BI
3. Increased BI adoption driven by mobile users
4. Significant application of in-memory processing
5. Growing interest in big data
6. Cloud options become legitimate options
7. Development of shared data applications

Reading this article and considering the current state of the business intelligence (BI) field it is safe to say the author was not far off. However, it is also safe to say each of these trends have not completely matured and continue to slowly develop. While big data still appears frequently in the headlines it seems to lost its mystique and become a better understood as further expansion of BI.

If I hadn't noticed the date the article was written (or the year 2013 in the title of the article) I would have assumed this article was written to predict the trends of 2014. Will 2014 be the year of big changes in the business intelligence field, will the field continue to slowly evolve, or have we seen the peak of BI? I doubt that BI has fully matured or will go away; my safe prediction for 2014 is that these trends from 2013 will continue for 2014.