Please respond to the following discussions;

D1

There is an article published on Unilytics about five most influential BI trends for 2017 (Karen, 2017). One of idea I would like to share is self-service BI. With tons of big data emerging everyday through EHR (electronic health record)system, self-service analytic has been growing for the increasing of data available to analyse.

We usually rely on IT teams for our analysing needs but most of time we do not get what we expected, sometimes IT team do not understand our requests and sometimes they have their own priorities and sometimes we misunderstand each other. Self-service BI provides the opportunities to people in healthcare system to use data to improve healthcare performance and outcomes without the anxiety of communicating with IT teams.

Reference

Karen (2017). 5 Most Influential BI Trends for 2017.

D2

The 2017 Faulkner Information Services report "Business Intelligence Solutions Market Trends" analyzes the current BI market to identify key players and trends (Shaw, 2017). The report identifies vendor consolidation, self service analytics, data visualization, Hadoop, open source, mobile devices, social media analytics, cloud computing, dashboards, information web portals, and real-time business process monitoring as the current key trends in the BI market.

Self service BI is described in the report as, "Probably the biggest trend in today's BI market" (Shaw, 2017, "Self Service" sect.). Self-service BI is replacing dedicated BI analysts in the IT department with non-specialists outside IT empowered with sophisticated self-service analytics tools. Non-specialists are not only performing data discovery, they are predicted to begin taking over the data preparation tasks, such as importing and parsing JSON and XML. A big part of the reason for this trend is that, "According to a survey conducted by analyst firm Gartner, administration costs can comprise up to 75 percent of the total cost of BI platform ownership; moreover, these costs are recurring." (Shaw, 2017, "Strategic Planning Implications" sect., para. 2).

AI-powered analytics is branch of self service BI which empowers non-specialists to perform their own data analysis with AI. IBM announced Watson Analytics in 2014, a BI product powered by the well-known IBM Watson AI platform. IBM Watson enables natural-language querying and, "detects hidden trends, and suggests additional types of analysis" (IBM Corporation, 2017, "Improving services to clients with easy analytics" sect.). Merging AI with BI to facilitate self service data analysis appears to be a unique differentiating feature for the IBM BI platform, but it may become a key trend among other vendors as the market evolves.

The BI vendors market has been marked recently by enterprise vendors (e.g., SAP, IBM, Oracle) acquiring standalone vendors (e.g., Cognos, Hyperion, KXEN), also known as "pure-play" vendors; however, Information Builders is a pure-play business analytics vendor which is still competitively selling its flagship product: "WebFOCUS". The latest version added enhancements for mobile devices, geospatial data mapping, and social media analytics. These latter two were explicitly named as important trends by Sharda et al. (2015), who calls location-based geospatial data analytics: "a critical emerging trend" (p. 594) and says that social media analytics, "continues to grow in popularity and business use" (p. 606).

Cloud computing is another trend noted by Sharda et al. (2015) that is corroborated in the Faulkner Information Services Report. Microsoft released its Power BI product on the Azure cloud platform, while SAP announced SAP Cloud for Analytics in 2015, and Qlik (an important pure-play BI vendor) released Qlik Sense Cloud Business in 2016. The Faulkner Report highlights the facts that cloud BI adoption jumped from 29% to 43% between 2013 and 2016 (Shaw, 2017, "Market Trends" sect.), and that a major impetus for cloud adoption is the increasing demand for data privacy and security.

References

IBM Corporation. (2017, October 12). Get business insights in minutes | IBM Watson Analytics. 

Information Builders (September 07, 2017). WebFOCUS New Features: Release 8.2 Version 01M. New York, NY: Information Builders, Inc..

Sharda, R., Delen, D., Turban, E., Aronson, J. E., Liang, T., & King, D. (2015). Business Intelligence and Analytics: Systems for Decision Support (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson

Shaw, R. (2017). Business Intelligence Solutions Market Trends (Docid: 00017785). Pennsauken, NJ: Faulkner Information Services.

D3

There is an article published on Unilytics about five most influential BI trends for 2017 (Karen, 2017). One of idea I would like to share is self-service BI.

With tons of big data emerging everyday through EHR (electronic health record)system, self-service analytic has been growing for the increasing of data available to analyse. We usually rely on IT teams for our analysing needs but most of time we do not get what we expected, sometimes IT team do not understand our requests and sometimes they have their own priorities and sometimes we misunderstand each other.

Self-service BI provides the opportunities to people in healthcare system to use data to improve healthcare performance and outcomes without the anxiety of communicating with IT teams.

Reference

Karen (2017). 5 Most Influential BI Trends for 2017.