Earlier this month, Forrester Consultant, Boris Evelson ( @bevelson ), commented that business has finally won the battle with IT over who will control Business Intelligence and Analytics.

The customer is the priority

The reason – businesses agree that the customer is the priority – and that BI must support the priorities and needs of customer-facing staff. [Tweet This]

IT finally has to accept that business users are grown-ups and must be able to make decisions within business-driven time frames

Two predictions

Boris makes two predictions that support the view that self-service BI platforms will continue to gain ground over traditional IT-driven BI solutions.

1 Horses for Courses

He predicts a “horses for courses” approach where best-of-breed BI platforms that can balance scalability and reduced operation risk with agility and faster time to insight will prevail.

He sees this kind of platform supporting business self-service while supporting technology management’s need to monitor and productionize selective analyses.

2. Self-Service must shift beyond analytics

He predicts that self-service must shift beyond simple analytics to support data wrangling.

Complex ETL processes cannot support business users, while most popular dashboarding tools cannot handle data transformation.

Self-service BI cannot be dependent on IT to develop, test and deploy new data transformation and integration processes for every new requirement.

Data wrangling – a light weight set of data transformation, integration and cleansing tools designed for the business user – is Boris’ answer to solving this problem

If big data is about time to insight – and in the competitive space of customer experience management it most certainly is – then companies that lose months trying to deploy technically complex BI solutions will lose market share to more agile competitors that leverage self-service big data platforms to deliver quickly. [Tweet this]

Do you agree with Boris?

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