IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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NZ businesses set to spend $90 million on BI and analytics
Thu, 4th Feb 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

The BI and analytics market is set to make a decent NZ$92.3 million from New Zealand businesses in 2016, as the business intelligence and analytics software market value increases 8.1% from the previous year.

That's according to the latest forecasts from analyst firm Gartner, which suggests New Zealand businesses are ahead of the curve with global revenue forecasts sitting at a 5.2% increase from 2015.

According to the company, the BI and analytics market is in the final stages of a multiyear shift from IT-led reporting and analysis systems to what Gartner terms the ‘modern BI and analytics platform.'

Experts at Gartner previously claimed BI and analytics will be top priorities for CIOs this year, as businesses shift focus away from big data towards advanced analytics.

"The shift to the modern BI and analytics platform has now reached a tipping point," explains Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner.

"Organisations must transition to easy-to-use, fast and agile modern BI platforms to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources,” he says.

The democratisation of analytics

Bertram says that because analytics has become increasingly strategic to most businesses and central to most business roles, every business is an analytics business, every business process is an analytics process and every person is an analytics user.

"It is no longer possible for chief marketing officers (CMOs) to be experts only in branding and ad placement," he says.

"They must also be customer analytics experts. The same is true for the chief HR, supply chain and financial roles in most industries."

To meet the time-to-insight demanded by today's competitive business environment, many organisations want to democratises analytics capabilities via self-service, Bertram says.

Defining the modern BI and analytics platform

According to Gartner, the most significant difference between a modern BI and analytics platform and a traditional, IT-centric reporting and analysis platform is the amount of upfront modelling required, as well as the skills needed, to build analytics content.

Creating analytics content via IT-centric reporting platforms starts with IT consolidating and modelling data in advance.

By contrast, a modern BI-A platform supports IT-enabled development of analytics content.

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"To get the full benefit of modern BI and analytics platforms, leaders must rethink most aspects of their current IT-centric, centralised analytics deployments, including technology, roles and responsibilities, organisational models, governance processes and leadership," Bertram explains.