Gartner, Inc. recently revealed its five predictions for business intelligence (BI) between 2009-2012. Analysts’ predictions ranged from the impact of business units exerting greater control over analytic applications to the effect of the economic crisis and how it will force a renewed focus on information trust and transparency to innovations such as collaborative decision making and trusted data providers.

Through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. The economic downturn forces businesses to be aware of changes in their organizations 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 organizations do not have the information, processes and tools needed to make informed, responsive decisions due to underinvestment in information infrastructure and business tools.

By 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for BI. Although IT organizations excel at building BI infrastructure, business users have lost confidence in the ability of them to deliver the information they need to make decisions. Business units drive analysis and performance management initiatives, mainly using spreadsheets that create dashboards full of metrics, plus analytic and packaged business applications to automate the process. Business units will increase spending on packaged analytic applications, including corporate performance management (CPM), online marketing analytics and predictive analytics that optimise processes, not just report on them.

By 2010, 20 percent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service (SaaS) as a standard component of their BI portfolio. Information aggregators will increasingly rely on SaaS to deliver domain specific analytic applications built from industry data they collect and shift the balance of power in the BI platform market in their favour. Companies will only share their data with aggregators that can guarantee security and confidentiality so, while hundreds of information aggregators offering SaaS analytic applications will emerge, a virtual monopoly will persist within each vertical niche because of the high barrier to entry for others.

In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with BI Platform capabilities.
The emergence of social software presents an opportunity for savvy IT leaders to exploit the groundswell of interest in informal collaboration. Instead of promoting a formal, top-down decision-making initiative, these IT leaders will tap people's natural inclination to use social software to collaborate and make decisions.

By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through course-grained application mashups. Businesses should not trust their megavendor to solve all their integration problems. Vendors move slowly to integrate the disparate code bases they have acquired. Reliance on one vendor also limits the ability to use best-of-breed capabilities and weakens the buyer's negotiating position. At the same time, business units do not care about grand visions for service-oriented architecture (SOA), such as assembling composite applications by weaving together fine-grained services.

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SOURCE: Gartner Reveals Business Intelligence Predictions for 2009-2012