Absolutely! The reports from Gartner are great (at least from my perspective) and there is a lot of useful information in them. I found the latest one particularly engaging.
As I read through the report, I started thinking about what it means to us (as practitioners in the Business Intelligence space) and thought I would jot down a few of my thoughts.
- Data discovery became a dominant theme for BI architectures. This is a very positive thing. Everyone we talk with complains about the time to value for BI programs/projects and we tell them all, that the secret sauce has a “data discovery” base. Analyzing/Profiling data early and often is the key to sustaining a successful BI project and data discovery is essential to finding key information among data.
- Big Data is here to stay. Big Data should be treated as a way of collecting, synthesizing and consuming information. So the three Vs (volume, velocity and variety) may be marketing terminology but in reality they do affect business processes and operations. The weight for each of the V is entirely dependent on the organization’s needs.
- The key factor in my humble opinion is to look at data management holistically and not get boxed into a specific model/framework aka “Source to ETL to DW to DM” etc which perhaps addresses only a subset of use cases of consuming information.