Over the last couple of decades, we’ve been observing a seemingly impenetrable barrier: No more than 20% of enterprise decision-makers who could be using business intelligence (BI) applications hands on are doing so. The other 80% still rely on the data and analytics skills of those 20% who do use BI applications. While the majority of the blame for the lack of more significant progress falls on low maturity in non-technology competencies — strategy, people, process, and data (only 7% of data and analytics decision-makers report advanced insights-driven business capabilities in their companies) — BI platforms take their share of the blame, too. Indeed, legacy BI is dead — a call Forrester first made in 2019. Today, business stakeholders struggle to get more mileage from BI applications because these applications are:

  • Not actionable and, ultimately, not impactful.
  • Delivered in silos and without context.
  • Still in the realm of data and analytics pros.

No, we are not going to make non-actionable calls (pun intended) about BI 3.0 (or is it 4.0? I forget) or “the dashboards are dead.” These are not useful or practical. Rather, we recommend that enterprises that want to squeeze every ounce of super valuable information from their data assets need to make their BI applications:

Impactful via insights-driven actions; based on augmented (infused with AI) capabilities; unifying all decisions, analytics, data sources, and data types; personalized for all user personas; based on adaptive, future fit technology; and pervasive — scaled across the enterprise and embedded in all digital workspaces or systems of work.

Long live BI. To find out more about the seven characteristics of modern BI applications and deployments, please read our latest report, The Future Of Business Intelligence.

Want to learn more about this topic? Join us at the upcoming Technology & Innovation North America event September 29-30 where I’ll be presenting a session entitled The Future Of BI Is Ambient And Personalized.