Technology Insight For Modern Analytics and Business Intelligence
Technology Insight For Modern Analytics and Business Intelligence
Summary
The analytics and BI platform market's multiyear shift of focus from IT-led reporting to business-
led self-service analytics is now mainstream. Data and analytics leaders should invest in modern
platforms for greater accessibility, agility and analytical insight from a diverse range of data
sources.
Overview
Key Findings
Most analytics and business intelligence (BI) programs have shifted their focus away from
delivering primarily reporting toward enabling self-service analytics for business users or to
delivering governed reporting and analytics in a more agile way.
Traditional reporting-based BI platforms are not designed to support the current pace and
dynamic nature of business change or the exponential growth in terms of the sources, volume
and complexity of data.
Modern analytics and BI platforms must be agile, user-friendly and trusted to support the
expanded — increasingly mission-critical, time-urgent and evolving — role of analytics in driving
competitiveness and creating business value.
Traditional BI platforms are being augmented with more agile solutions, often purchased by
individual business units — a development that challenges IT departments to support a
broader portfolio.
Recommendations
Data and analytics leaders responsible for maintaining and modernizing analytics and BI
strategies should:
Use modern analytics and BI platforms to expand user adoption and deliver higher business
value from analytics investments by empowering line-of-business users who have the domain
knowledge.
Address changes to IT roles and responsibilities by shifting from a sole owner and doer
mentality to enabler of wider access to data and collaborative content development.
Determine when best to use existing, traditional BI technologies versus modern analytics and
BI by assessing governance, repeatability and functionality requirements.
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Analysis
Analytics is increasingly strategic to businesses and is now central to most business roles. It is
no longer possible for chief marketing officers to be experts solely in branding and the
placement of advertisements — they must also be experts in customer analytics. The same is
true of HR, supply chain and finance roles in most industries.
To meet the time-to-insight demands of today's competitive business environment, many
organizations aim to expand analytics with self-service capabilities. The associated insertion of
analytics deeper into lines of business has significantly changed the traditional BI model and
end-user requirements. The modern analytics and BI platform is characterized by agility, flexibility
and ease of use, all of which are critical in every phase of the analytic workflow, from data source
acquisition to execution of actionable insights.
Definition
A modern analytics and BI platform supports IT-enabled analytic content development. It is
defined by a self-contained architecture that enables nontechnical users to autonomously
execute full-spectrum analytic workflows from data access, ingestion and preparation to
interactive analysis and the collaborative sharing of insights.
Description
There are six key components of an analytic workflow that define a BI platform: data source, data
model, data ingestion and preparation, content authoring, analysis, and insight delivery. In this
regard, differences between the approaches of modern and traditional BI platforms are evident.
They are outlined in Table 1.
Table 1. Summary of Differences Between Traditional and Modern Analytics and Business
Intelligence Platforms by Analytic Workflow Component
Analytic Workflow Component
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Data source
Modern BI Platform
Relational, Hadoop, semi-structured, NoSQL, flat files
On-premises and/or cloud
Data model
Traditional BI IT-produced
Platform
Content authoring
Analysis
Insight delivery
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Modern BI Platform Sharing and collaboration, storytelling, chat bots, and open APIs
These six components are reflected in the modern BI and analytics platform architecture shown
in Figure 1. Each is described in more detail to emphasize the differences between traditional
and modern BI platforms.
Figure 1. A Modern Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform Architecture
Sensor/machine-generated data
Integrated/enriched datasets resulting from the combination of disparate data sources
Organizational "dark data" traditionally hidden from, or beyond the scope of, BI technologies,
such as emails and documents
Direct access to cloud application data sources
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The key differentiator of a modern analytics and BI platform is that users have the
option to use centrally modeled and curated environments, but are not required to
do so as a starting point.
A modern BI platform does not require exclusive access through a predefined semantic layer.
Rather, a data model is built by harmonizing and enriching a range of modeled and unmodeled
data sources in the data preparation layer and as part of visual-based analysis. The degree and
extent of reusability of the model and the objects defined within the model vary by vendor. This
allows users to autonomously and iteratively ingest and prepare data enabled by columnar/in-
memory data storage to support analytical speed and agility. The rapid modeling and prototyping
within the analytic BI platform may also be used as requirements for data persistence within a
data warehouse. In choosing where to model and how to store the data, customers must always
consider the trade-offs between reusability, consistency, scalability and agility (see "Avoid a Big
Data Warehouse Mistake by Evolving to the Logical Data Warehouse Now" ). It accomplishes this
through the self-service data preparation capabilities listed in the sections below; aspects of
"augmented data preparation" that use machine learning may automate some of the work and
accelerate the time to insight (see "Augmented Analytics Is the Future of Data and Analytics" ).
Agile modeling:
These are capabilities to prepare data for analysis that are accessed by IT staff or power users,
data analysts, and data engineers. They may be manual or augmented by machine learning, but
support an iterative and agile workflow because of the self-contained nature of the analytics and
BI platform. Capabilities include:
Data transformation
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Auto-inference:
These capabilities introduce automation into the self-service data preparation workflow, thereby
enabling self-service data preparation for a broader range of nontechnical users. Capabilities
include:
Built-in geocoding
Built-in date conversion and time series functions
Data blending:
This is the ability to join datasets before loading them into a columnar or in-memory BI platform
data store, or for the purpose of creating a federated/logical view of data for direct access using
the following capabilities:
Inference and suggestions for the correct table joins and relationships
A modern analytics and BI platform ideally supports the blending of disparate data sources,
either in a reusable model for others to consume or within an individual dashboard view. Data
virtualization tools may provide an alternative, but the difference here is in the ease by which a
business user can perform this task.
Direct query:
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For a BI platform to be considered modern, it must offer self-service capabilities that enable
nontechnical users to do the following without assistance from their IT department:
Create storyboards/narratives
In contrast to traditional BI platforms that primarily address the descriptive end of the analytic
spectrum, modern analytics and BI platforms enable nontechnical content authors not only to
address descriptive analytics, but also to evolve to diagnostic analytics to answer the question,
"Why did this happen?" and, increasingly, to predictive analytics ("What might happen?"). They do
so by means of intuitive drag-and-drop authoring environments for interactive visualization and
increasingly advanced analytics for citizen data scientists supporting clustering, forecasting and
other data science.
Modern analytics and BI platforms support a workflow that enables business users to begin with
interactive exploration and rapid prototyping, the result being deployment of production content
for distribution and consumption. This is in stark contrast to the traditional approach to BI,
whereby all requirements had to be identified in the initial phases of a project — the traditional BI
platform being designed for a top-down approach, in contrast to the modern bottom-up
approach.
A critical point to note is that simply adding modern capabilities, such as visualization or
collaboration, to a BI platform that requires traditional data access and/or data
ingestion/preparation does not make that platform modern. All aspects of the analytic workflow
must be modern for a BI platform to be categorized as such.
Analysis: From Predefined Reporting to Free-Form Visual Exploration
As noted in the previous section, much of the analytic content that will be created for
consumption by a growing population of business users in the modern BI world will originate as
interactive exploration accessed by nontechnical users through modern analytics and BI
platforms. This need will continue to evolve and expand as organizations seek to increase the
degree to which analytics drive organizational decision making and as access to data and
analytic capabilities is extended to all workers. The types of analysis that a modern BI platform
will be required to support include:
Interaction with, and free-form interaction iterative modeling of, data through visual
exploration, search, natural-language query and conversational bots
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It is further expected that a modern analytics and BI platform will support a diverse range of
interaction options that enable end users to access analytic capabilities from any physical
location via a web browser or any form factor of mobile device. Traditional BI delivery through
client/server-based platforms that require desktop software for every content user or additional
IT-led development efforts to enable mobile device access does not support the modern need for
speed and agility.
Business users and analysts are also receptive to new ways of interacting with data through
automated recommendations, new visualizations types and augmented data discovery (see
"Augmented Analytics Is the Future of Data and Analytics" ). All of these will continue to evolve
and mature to the point where they become assumed features of modern analytics and BI
platforms.
Scheduled refresh and delivery to consumers of reports that are often printed
Scheduled refresh of dashboards, with notification of updates of new data or new business
events
However, without a modern BI platform, interactivity is limited, predefined and often restricted by
the content author, so users frequently export report data to other formats (such as Microsoft
Excel) to continue to analyze it and to combine it with other sources. The way insights are shared
and socialized by modern analytic BI platforms is one of their key attractions.
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In modern analytics and BI platforms, sharing, collaborating and socializing of content through a
portal and/or social and collaboration capabilities enhances the interpretation of results and
deciding on the best resulting actions. This activity is further enhanced by the ability to string
together insights as interactive and shared storyboards that "walk" collaborators through a series
of insights that lead to conclusions and recommended actions. Modern analytics and BI
platforms also enable users to define triggers and thresholds that produce automatic alerts and
notifications when certain user-specified conditions are met or thresholds exceeded.
Social interaction about analytic content using live chats, annotations, conversation timelines,
likes/dislikes, content rating, ability to follow, recommendations and so on
Alerts and notifications based on manually defined or automated triggers/thresholds
Open APIs to allow external access to user-built data models and analytic content developed
within the modern BI platform's self-contained architecture
The innovation that comes with an agile and iterative modern analytic BI platform delivers the
necessary building blocks to increase analytic maturity and derive value from data. This allows
organizations to gain new, previously undiscovered insights with which to improve decision
making. It also creates opportunities for differentiation and new revenue streams as new
insights are packaged and extended to customers, partners and suppliers.
Adoption Rate
Demand for modern analytic BI platforms now reflects mainstream buying, in which revenue
growth in this market is in double digits, while traditional BI buying is flat to declining (see
"Market Share: Analytics and Business Intelligence, Worldwide, 2016" ).
Figure 2 reflects investment plans based on a 1Q17 Gartner webinar that shows growth and
continued investment in modernizing.
Figure 2. Plans for Modernizing and Enabling Business-User-Authored Content
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n = 129
Source: Gartner (September 2017)
Figure 3 is based on the Gartner BI and analytics Magic Quadrant survey conducted in 4Q16. This
survey includes vendor-supplied customer references and is, thus, for customers who have
already deployed modern BI and analytic capabilities. The results of this survey were derived
from 1,931 responses. Although 20% of the survey respondents say they do not plan to offer
business-authored content, this may be that customers are modernizing, but IT continues to
model data sources, author dashboards and reports using modern capabilities.
Figure 3. Plans for Enabling Business-Authored Content
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Base: n = 1398
Question: What is the state of your BI and analytics portfolio for business-authored content?
Source: Gartner (September 2017)
Risks
Data and analytics leaders that fail to adopt modern platforms will be unable to respond to the
faster pace of business, more sophisticated analytic requirements and to users' voracious
appetite for fast insights from more data sources than ever before. A traditional centralized and
rigidly IT-centric approach cannot meet these new, time-sensitive requirements.
But despite the obvious benefits of BI platform modernization, organizations must assess the
potential drawbacks of a shift to a modern BI platform:
The possible need for significant change management and additional resources to help the IT
organization support the new data and analytics operating model
Cultural implications of broader data access and a shift in roles and responsibilities
Evaluation Factors
Gartner publishes a detailed "Critical Capabilities for Business Intelligence and Analytics
Platforms" report as a companion to the "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics
Platforms." This provides an in-depth comparison of products and vendors that meet the
definition of a modern analytic BI platform. Additionally, "Toolkit: BI and Analytics Platform RFP"
covers the detailed functionality that a modern analytic and BI platform should have.
Recommendations
Data and analytics leaders should use modern analytics and BI platforms' capabilities to
introduce agility and iterative development of analytic content into their organizations. Rather
than focus on upfront modeling and development of data structures that will prove difficult to
adapt to changing business conditions, the IT organization must adopt an enablement role and
empower business users and analysts to derive timely insights with the highest business value.
Existing investments in traditional BI platforms, supporting processes and data structures should
still be used, where appropriate, to promote consistency; however, data and analytics leaders
must balance the need for consistency and scalability with the ever-increasing need for speed
and agility. They must determine how to support both ends of the spectrum and provide an
appropriate mix of skills, training and support for each user and use case.
Finally, data and analytics leaders must take a holistic approach to platform modernization. They
need to realize that, without appropriate change management, skills readiness, a data-driven
culture, comprehensive data and analytics strategy, adding modern capabilities to a traditional,
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IT-led program will not yield the full benefits of a modern analytics and BI platform.
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