John Sands of Qlik will cover advances in human-computer interaction; big data; information activism; the new role of IT as 'shopkeeper'; differentiation through analytics; diagnostics, predictive analytics and mobility.
A neuroscience buff, Sands said more 'natural' user interaction is one of the driving forces in modern software. "It is partly due to rapid advances in this area that Gartner puts 'data discovery' tools at the vanguard of modern BI," he said.
"If user interaction is more intuitive, adoption will happen far more rapidly. The keyboard, for example, is a 150-year-old technology and it doesn't conform to the way the brain works, so Qlik continues its drive to embed technologies like touch and speech into our software."
The data explosion continues unabated, Sands continued. "That's not new, but our response to this should change. Continuing hardware and software advances in the fields of addressable memory, disk space and big data analytics make it unnecessary to archive everything. With tools like Hadoop we can keep it all online and access it at the drop of a hat."
The third trend concerns the continuing 'consumerisation' of technologies. "People have access to an incredible array of technologies at home and are becoming very discerning about what they're given to work with at their place of employment or on the go," Sands added.
"In the BI world we see it as information activism. Qlik acknowledged it early on with user-driven data discovery - BI can only be meaningful if it caters to the questions business users across the enterprise have. So, among other things, we put a lot of work into visualisation as self-expression. We don't just give people pie charts and bar graphs, but a wide array of intuitive visualisation tools, so as to be able to tell the stories they want to get across."
In conjunction with this trend, said Sands, the company is witnessing a change in IT's role in the enterprise - from gatekeeper to shopkeeper. "It's no longer about guarding company systems and eking out information as, when and how the IT director sees fit, but about empowering users with the tools they need to create their own visualisations."
In keeping with the theme of analytics-empowered users, Qlik is also noting a shift in the way business applications are deployed. "Whereas analytics used to be an add-on of CRM and ERP applications, business applications are now being implemented around analytical capabilities," said Sands. "This is great because, in a digital environment, businesses gain differentiation through exploitation of information, an aim not well served by information silos."
Another consequence of information activism is an increasing demand for analytics tools that go beyond reactive summaries of historic trends, delivering proactive insight as well as diagnostic and scenario-planning capabilities.
"As increasing numbers of business users discover the power of analytics to reveal business shortfalls and opportunities, there is growing demand for BI that doesn't just reactively report the what, but also allows users to unearth why a business outcome happened and enables them to simulate how input variables can alter outcomes. This is BI that delivers speed and agility, not just reports."
Lastly, he says, BI is increasingly also driven by mobility, and coming up with adaptive interfaces that automatically resize according to the device to deliver powerful data visualisation and analytics on the move.
"A lot of these themes are interrelated and work in conjunction," said Sands. "The common thread is the user, who has inherited some of the power vesting in IT. We're delivering the BI that people want, in the way that they want it, and in the way that they think and act."
