Business Intelligence - The Path Ahead

In my previous post, "[Business Intelligence is Dead. Long Live Business Intelligence](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/business-intelligence-dead-long-live-sandeep-upadhyay/?trackingId=FxkUzIuBRgSeEsWTFKSQYA%3D%3D&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_publishing_post_edit%3BR%2B5%2Bbj7KQjiU%2Ft7QUmPKLg%3D%3D)", I had shared my perspectives about the inherent challenges that lead to poor adoption of Business Intelligence applications.

In this article, I will share key perspectives on how future business applications will shape up to fundamentally address the adoption challenges that plague today's applications.

Future BI ecosystem/ applications would

• **Drive hyper-personalization** both in terms of experience and adapting the content to what is useful/ needed for the end-user. Experience personalization translates providing situation appropriate interaction mechanism (i.e. based on if the user is on the road, in the field, in a meeting or at his desk). Content personalization translates to a Netflix like model where relevant insights, KPI's and metrics are served to the user based on his interest, past interactions, and user group behavior.
• Be **effective at insight exploration & interrogation. **They would allow interactions in natural language and generate KPI's and visualizations on the fly based on what the user is asking for. This would eliminate the traditional ways of building pre-canned visualizations and reports. AR/ VR integration would help realize complex multi-dimensional visualizations in a 3D space for quickly uncovering insights.
• **Unify and act as an information gateway **for all forms of relevant intelligence (market research, competitive intelligence, print, media, social, transactions & interactions). This would be a major game-changer as it would unify all insight consumption through a common gateway
• **Have workflow and integration capabilities** that go beyond collaboration, sharing and commenting (social features). We could see integrations with other systems of engagement such as email, sales force automation, calendar/ scheduling, phone, admin system, CRM etc. This would allow the end-user to seamlessly plan for and translate insight into action without going through multiple applications

I think of the following simplified block diagram to illustrate the components of any future BI ecosystem/ application.

Most of the BI tools in the market address part of the puzzle/ need. For instance, new-age tools like ThoughtSpot allow for simplified querying and dynamic visualizations, Power BI allows for content search using NLP and auto visualization generation on datasets, Qlik (along with its Crunchbot acquisition) allows for API based access to create dynamic visualizations and chatbot like features. MicroStrategy has the best implementation of BI on mobile platforms/ tablets with some write-back capabilities. Domo, YellowFin and likes have great social/ collaboration features.

Many of my peers say that the future of BI is conversational and/ or a chatbot. While it is definitely a step forward, I think the future of BI is a **smart analytics digital assistant **that is powered by the capabilities noted above.