Emerging Technology will Maginalise IT: Says Gartner
Emerging Technology will Maginalise IT: Says Gartner
March 19, 2008: Gartner have polished out a prophecy from their crystal ball and projected that by 2012, emerging technology will simplify the building and consumption of analytical applications, reducing the role of IT in Business Intelligence (BI).
Neil McMurchy, research director at Gartner explains there is evidence to suggest that BI is being used aggressively by just 15 to 20 percent of business users, and for the sector to thrive it needs to overcome the fact that most business users feel BI tools are hard to use.
“Other technologies, such as personal productivity, collaboration and Internet search have been widely adopted by mainstream users in both their business and personal lives. BI has the same opportunity for massive adoption, but it must overcome its well-earned reputation of being difficult to use,” said McMurchy.
Gartner believe that much of the innovation in the BI space will come from emerging technologies that will make it easier for users to build and consume their own reports and analytical applications. The research firm points to interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, search, software as a service and service-orientated architecture being the technologies to watch as they will help drive mainstream BI adoption.
Long term there are other bumps on the road that McMurchy is forewarning about, such as the development aspect of BI platforms and how they are making it easier to use data., “the challenge for IT is that this will proliferate pockets of BI and enterprises won’t have just one BI platform but rather they’ll have several vendor products,” he said.
Gartner also points to the idea of metrics, as there must be thousands of people who look at page after page of metrics but have no time to really do anything about them. This is particularly relevant to BI platforms which rely so heavily on measurements as a core function and McMurchy believes there’s no point in measuring something if you can’t do anything about it.