The Real Business Intelligence Trends in 2022

Many companies are still adapting to changed requirements due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the situation now seems less acute and more long-term changes toward a ‘new normal’ are on the horizon, day-to-day business is far from settled. Some companies are dealing with last year’s decline in orders, while others are coping with the ongoing supply chain disruptions or are still in the midst of adapting their business model to the changed requirements or better equipping themselves for possible future crises.

A look at this year’s business intelligence trends reveals that companies are still working to position themselves well for the long term and are working on the foundation of their data usage. Instead, companies are addressing the root causes of their challenges (e.g., data quality) and also tackling the holistic establishment of a data-driven culture.

The BARC Data, BI and Analytics Trend Monitor 2022 illustrates which trends are currently regarded as important in addressing these challenges by a broad group of BI and analytics professionals. Their responses provide a comprehensive picture of regional, company and industry specific differences and offer insights into developments in the BI market and the future of BI.

Our long-term comparisons also show how trends have developed, making it possible to separate hype from stable trends. BARC’s Data, BI and Analytics Trend Monitor 2022 reflects on the business intelligence, analytics and data management trends currently driving the market from a user perspective.

The Most (and Least) Important Business Intelligence Trends in 2022

We asked 2,396 users, consultants and vendors for their views on the most important BI, analytics and data management trends, delivering an up-to-date perspective on regional, company and industry-specific differences and providing comprehensive insights on the BI, analytics and data management market.

Data quality/master data management, data-driven culture and data governance are the three topics that practitioners identified as the most important trends in their work.

At the other end of the spectrum, mobile BI, augmented analytics and IoT data and analytics were voted as the least important of the twenty trends covered in BARC’s survey.

Master data and data quality management in first position has retained this ranking over the last five years while the second most important trend, establishing a data-driven culture, has steadily increased in importance. 

The significance of these two topics transcends individual regions and industry sectors. Establishing a data-driven culture is a trend that was newly introduced to the BARC Trend Monitor three years ago. Starting from fifth position in the first edition, it made its way up to third place in the last two years and is now ranked number two. 

Data governance has also increased in importance. Having held down fourth position for several years, it rose to number three this year. Data discovery and visualization and self-service analytics (ranked four and five respectively) have been equally consistent trends, but both have now taken a back seat to data-driven culture.

Our View on the Results

Master data and data quality management in first position  has been ranked as the most important trend for five years in a row now. The stability of this trend shows the relevance of having good quality data to be significantly higher than other trend topics with a much broader presence in the media. It also reflects the fact that many organizations place high emphasis on their master data and data quality management because they have not reached their goals yet.

This is in line with findings of other BARC Surveys that repeatedly show that companies are constantly battling with insufficient data quality as a hurdle to making better use of data. Hence, master data and data quality management will remain very important and is also linked to the equally stable significance of data governance, which was ranked in fourth position for four consecutive years before climbing to third place this year.

Establishing a data-driven culture has increased in importance and is now ranked as the second most important trend. Since its introduction to the Trend Monitor in 2019, this trend has always ranked among the top five and is constantly gaining in prominence. This can be explained by the rising awareness that fostering a data-driven culture is vital to realizing the full data potential of a company. 

Data discovery and data visualization and self-service BI have slipped down the rankings slightly this year. However, being ranked four and five in our list of 20 topics underlines their importance to organizations. All the top trends combine organizational and technological elements. They act as a solid foundation on which most companies are keen to put great emphasis.

The top five trends represent the foundation for organizations to manage their own data and make good use of it. Furthermore, they demonstrate that organizations are aware of the relevance of high quality data and its effective use. Organizations want to go beyond the collection of as much data as possible and actively use data to improve their decision making processes. This is also supported by data warehouse modernization, which holds on to sixth position this year. 

Some trends have slightly increased in importance since last year (e.g., data catalogs and alerting). However, most have stayed the same or just changed one rank.

There are some major shifts in the downward trends. Data preparation by business users dropped from rank seven to rank ten due to alerting and agile BI development climbing the rankings. Mobile BI also fell three places to rank eighteen. In this case, a continuous downward trend can be observed over the last four years.

Source: Business Application Research Center (BARC)