I recently returned from the TDWI spring conference in Chicago, where I spent 3 days meeting attendees, sitting in on parts of some classes and also presented a course on BI in the Cloud.  I am always interesting assessing the trends in BI by listening to what the attendees have to say and gauging course interest.  While it's unscientific at best, it has been a fairly good predictor over the years of where the focus on BI has gone.

This year, the topics that seem to generate the most buzz were:

• Agile BI
• Data Visualization
• Statistical Analytics
  

I spoke with a number of attendees that had mature BI programs and were interested in new ways to add value.  They had conquered reporting, OLAP analysis, events & notifications, dashboards and scorecards and felt as though their programs weren't keeping up with the current needs of their users.  Their users were becoming more sophisticated and looking for new ways to analyze their data.  They were also looking for ways to increase the velocity of their project iterations as users have started to look to software-as-a-service (SaaS) to address data and functionality gaps. 

The attendees that I spoke with that are new to BI were concerned primarily with the well publicized rate of failed BI projects.  Some worked for companies that had past failures with BI and were interested in how Agile project management might help.  They were also interested in technologies that might facilitate Agile projects.

Only time will tell whether Agile BI, data visualization and advanced analytics will become this year's major trends in BI.  However, it's exciting to see strong interest in areas that have the potential to change the way we deliver BI and the value of what we deliver.  What's interesting is that these aren't new concepts in the world of project management and data analysis, it's just that we may have matured to a point where they become front and center in our focus.

I'm interested in your thoughts on what you think will be the major trends in BI in 2010.  You can leave your comments below or feel free to email me at sdine@datasourceconsulting.com.