Systems are Dead. Why 2015 Is Bringing New BI to IT

Did you know? We’ve moved past older legacy BI platforms into a new age of cloud business intelligence. And not only does that eliminate the need for your group to build, maintain and manage a slew of servers and umpteen upgrades—it REDUCES your workload requests, because you’ve delivered self-service BI to all your users.

The reason I ask if you’re aware of this is: There are a LOT of CIOs these days who think they are absolutely delivering, when the rest of the business is not convinced. So, you and your team may be impressed with your ability to manage data in house without needing to outsource, but no one can see that—they can only see what’s in front of them.

Is your IT group viewed as an obstacle?

– CIO.com, The Annual State of the CIO

You want your business people to KNOW what they’re getting from IT, so your department keeps its visibility and value within your company. The good news is with GoodData, you can actually deliver what your users want and INCREASE your value. When looking to deliver game-changing technology—IT has an amazing opportunity right now. Move your BI to the cloud for faster INSIGHT. Give people what they want—very smoothly, very quickly, while also reducing IT work load and up-leveling people’s perception of you to be more strategic and prominent.

How Do You Strengthen the IT-Business Connection?

Business leaders want CIOs to simplify technology and reorganize IT for easier access, according to recent research by CIO.com. “They also want to see a lot more IT focus on external customer concerns,” reports CIO editor in chief Maryfran Johnson. And internal business users are looking for access to all sorts of new types of data—with easy-to-use, strong, self-service analytical tools. They don’t want to jump through hoops or have to wait to get access to the type of data they want to analyze, because... they are trying to improve business, daily.

Look, everybody’s on the same team—you, the business leaders, and all those different business users are working for the same company; you all want to make that company succeed. “‘The idea that business and IT are separate is not healthy,’ cautions CIO Bill Swislow of Cars.com. So, if you’re ready to show your company that IT is committed to improving business—ask people exactly what they want, and give it to them with GoodData.

Can You Afford to Implement Cloud-based BI?

The real question is can you afford NOT to—go ahead, just imagine if you DIDN’T do it... If you let BI pass you by for another year: what would THAT cost your company?

Cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) is projected to grow from $.75B to $2.94B between 2013 and 2018, attaining a 31% CAGR.”

Redwood Capital, via Forbes

According to an IDC forecast, public cloud services spending is projected to hit $56.6 billion in 2014 en route to $127 billion in 2018.” And more than half of the global growth in software, server and storage spending by then will be because of Cloud Services. So, if you are at all concerned with asking for the funds to up your analytics budget and get your company set up for Cloud BI, know that there's a “generally positive consensus among 2015 predictions for the US economy and the tech market forecast is looking equally optimistic,” according to Forrester's annual industry outlook. And it looks like much of the software spending increases in 2015—estimated to be around $620 billion—will go toward analytics, as-a-service, and enterprise process apps such as ERP and CRM.

Forrester predicts if you’re a CIO, you can confidently push to increase your 2015 budget by 4-6% to purchase tech goods and services.

ZDNet

In the same report, Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels “doubled down on the analytics aspect,” according to business technology writer Natalie Gagliordi. And they’re recommending CIOs to focus on building up their big data capabilities in order to stay competitive.

By 2016, 25% of new BI and analytic platform deployments will be in the form of subscription to cloud business analytics services.

Dan Sommer, Frank Buytendijk, Kurt Schlegel, 11 November 2014
Market Trends: Business Intelligence Tipping Points Herald a New Era of Analytics

Making Self-Service BI Real

While 56% of CIOs expect to experience IT skills shortages in the next 12 months, “the search for the elusive "data scientist (some say it's akin to finding a unicorn) tops the list,” says the 2014 State of the CIO report. Well, hey – guess what? You can stop hunting for data scientists who are most often needed for older, legacy, BI solutions, because cloud systems and Cloud BI solutions like GoodData offers can be accessed by average business users. Which means everybody profits from INSIGHT sooner.

And for external users, when you use a cloud-based BI solution like Powered by GoodData with stringent levels of perimeter security and data safeguarding—it not only eliminates the underlying technology stack as a barrier to entry for exploiting advanced analytics, it essentially allows all participants to focus on the value that the delivered INSIGHT provides without incurring the costs, effort, maintenance, and extended time-to-value requirements of individual on-premise BI environments.

So, by implementing GoodData, not only have you delivered to your internal customers exactly what they want from IT, you may have just opened up a whole new can of potential business for your company! What do you think about that?