Time to look back. 2021 has been a strange yet decisive year for Business Intelligence: the sector did not live through a headline-grabbing technological revolution, but something deeper and quieter. This was the year data moved, for good, to the cloud, and the year many companies discovered that their biggest challenge was not the tool but the culture. Here is what the year leaves us with.
The thread of the year: digital acceleration settles in
If 2020 was the year of the shock —remote work overnight, improvisation— 2021 has been the year that forced transformation turned into strategy. Companies stopped firefighting and started building with intent.
Four major currents emerged from that consolidation:
- The move to the cloud. What began as a need for remote access turned into an architecture decision. More and more organisations choose to deploy their BI in the cloud for scalability, cost and access from anywhere.
- The rise of self-service. With distributed teams and growing demand for data, waiting for IT to produce every report stopped being viable. Self-service BI —giving business people the tools to answer their own questions— has gone from a trend to an expectation.
- Data literacy as the bottleneck. And here is the big discovery of the year: buying licences does not create a data culture. Without people who can read, question and use data, the best platform stays underused.
- Fundamentals back in the spotlight. The more access is democratised, the more the foundation matters: clean data, solid pipelines and well-defined metrics.
The platforms in 2021
The tools market also made clear moves during the year:
- Microsoft (Power BI). This was the year its leadership consolidated: Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms, backed by a combination of aggressive pricing, integration with the Office ecosystem and a huge community.
- Qlik. It pushed hard on its cloud and SaaS offering, giving customers the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, on-premise or in hybrid models. It also kept data literacy at the centre of adoption, an approach we fully share.
- Tableau. It continued its integration within Salesforce following the acquisition, bringing visual analytics closer to the world of CRM and customer data.
The underlying conclusion is that the three major tools we work with —Qlik, Tableau and Power BI— point in the same direction: cloud, accessibility and analysis within reach of more people.
Data culture: the real challenge
If we had to keep a single lesson from 2021, it would be this: technology is almost never the problem any more. The tools are mature, powerful and accessible. The bottleneck has shifted to people and processes.
We have seen it in project after project: the difference between a company that makes the most of its data and one that does not rarely lies in the software. It lies in whether the organisation knows how to tell stories with data, design dashboards people understand, trust the figures and decide from them. Data culture —not the licence— is what separates those who win with BI from those who merely pay for it.
What we published this year
Throughout 2021 we have written about the topics that defined the year. If you want to dig deeper, here are our articles:
- Data literacy and why it matters
- Data storytelling: how to tell stories with data
- How to design a good dashboard
- What is ETL and why it’s the foundation of every data project
- Cloud vs on-premise Business Intelligence
What we can sense for 2022
Without playing fortune-teller, the direction looks clear. The cloud will keep gaining ground and the focus will shift towards modern data architectures: more flexible, scalable ways to organise, govern and serve data across the whole organisation. As access becomes widespread, governance and quality —who sees what, and with what guarantees— will matter more and more.
But above technology, 2022 will again be a year about people. The companies that win will not be the ones that buy the shiniest tool, but the ones that get their people to know how to use it.
Conclusion
2021 has been the year data moved to the cloud and the year we learned, beyond any doubt, that data culture is the real engine of BI. The infrastructure is there; the challenge is human.
At Digital Fox Data we support companies on both fronts: the technical foundation with our Business Intelligence consulting and the people with our Business Intelligence training. If you want 2022 to be the year your organisation goes from having data to using it, let’s talk.