Trends for BI users 2019

Although the topic of "establishing a data-driven corporate culture" made its debut in Barc's BI Trends Monitor this year, the 2679 BI users and consultants surveyed made it the fifth most important trend.

At the same time, remarkable regional differences can be observed here: Companies on the American continent attach far more importance to this trend than European ones.

Among North American groups, the trend even ranks first, while respondents from South America see it in second place. As in the previous year, master data and data quality management was even voted the number one most important trend for BI users, and the topic of data governance is now seen as equally important as the long-popular trend toward self-service BI.

"The results reflect a profound change in the way business is done today"

notes Carsten Bange, founder and CEO of Barc.

"Creating a data-driven corporate culture means replacing gut feelings with decisions based on data and facts. These can be simple key figures such as sales or profit, but also results from advanced analytical models or from qualitative data.

The corporate culture provides the breeding ground on which both sets of rules such as data governance and concrete forms of implementation such as orderly master data and data quality management thrive.

However, a data-driven culture does not mean blindly following these numbers. Rather, it should encourage the development of interpretive skills and critical thinking when dealing with data, so that companies not only base their decisions on reliable data, but also know when it's better not to."

Among the trends that have gained significantly in importance compared to last year are the topics of agile BI development, advanced analytics, and analytics teams/data labs.

"While agile BI has become a popular development approach in the BI world, the growth in advanced analytics makes it clear that companies need to use data more advantageously"

Bange says.

"Advanced analytics includes machine learning, which is closely related to many currently hotly debated use cases in artificial intelligence."

With 2679 participants from all over the world, the Barc-BI Trend Monitor 2019 is the largest global trend survey on business intelligence and data management. It provides a detailed evaluation and weighting of individual trends by region, industry, and company self-assessment.

The full report is available free of charge: https://bi-survey.com/top-business-intelligence-trends