By Evgeny Scherbinin, CEO of Prime Source
According to Gartner’s forecasts, by 2020 the number of users of business analytics tools worldwide will grow by 75% and the market will pass the $200 billion mark. Three years ago the market did not exceed $130 billion.
Business Intelligence (BI), or Data Discovery, is a set of methods and solutions that help turn large volumes of data into a form that is clear and usable for the user. Business analytics helps solve a wide range of tasks in management, sales performance analysis, staff assessment, budget planning, strategic decision-making and many other areas.
The development of BI is now in the third round of its evolution. In other words, we can speak of business analytics 3.0. In the first two stages of BI’s development, important questions related to processing information and producing reports were solved, but those stages had a number of significant limitations. Obtaining reports in an accessible form, for example, required the work of dedicated data analytics specialists and sometimes of entire departments. The process of obtaining and processing information took a long time. Despite all this, the resulting information was not always 100% accurate.
At the same time, the availability of data skills is one of the main trends in the labor market. According to IBM Quant Crunch, by 2020 around 2.73 million new jobs requiring the ability to work with business analytics and big data will appear worldwide.
The United States is traditionally regarded as the center of BI competence, but there are trendsetters in this field in Europe as well. The Swedish company Qlik, for example, has developed a third generation of BI that uses a comprehensive platform approach.
The capabilities of the third generation of BI have expanded thanks to a new approach to creating analytical solutions, known as Data Discovery. Unlike the cumbersome systems of the past, Data Discovery solutions build reports for users on a simple graphical interface, which makes information easier to grasp. Now an employee with any level of training can obtain information in the form of information catalogs prepared for analytics and covering all the necessary areas.
Qlik has begun to use approaches such as “associative indexing” and “augmented intelligence” in its systems, which allow the user to spot new relationships in the data. In this way the user gains new ideas for exploring information.
Everyone who uses subscriptions such as Netflix comes across BI — it is behind the series the service recommends to the user. Using this technology, among others, has allowed Netflix to become a leader in streaming services. America’s biggest provider of entertainment content began using big data to identify user preferences. On this basis the company decides what kinds of original content to create. If you look at the service’s latest series, you can clearly trace all the trends of recent times in them. Today the service has 148.8 million subscribers and, according to Kommersant, the company’s revenue grew by 35% in 2018.