InetSoft Webinar: What Future Trends are Coming to BI?

This is the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Business Intelligence in Utilities Industry" The speaker is Jessica Little, Marketing Manager at InetSoft.

Interviewer: Regarding your interest in business intelligence, what do you see as some of the future trends in BI?

Jessica Little: Well, I’ve been working in the business intelligence industry for quite a while now, 10 years approximately. In general I am a very quantitative person so I like facts based on numbers. So that’s where Business Intelligence comes into the picture. And on the other hand, believe it or not, as a faculty member I actually deal with business decisions quite often. So when you link data and business together, you get to business intelligence. This is why you can afford over 10 years and focus on exclusively the domain of BI.

Interviewer: Okay. And what about utilities? Are you dealing with analytics and utilities as well?

Jessica Little: Yes. So for the past two years, my main focus has been a lot on the utility side, particularly on arising sensors and smart grid utilities. That’s what spawned my interest in utilities.

A lot of things are happening in utilities these days so with the advent of the smart grid utilities, we’ll be collecting a lot more information both from the customers and from their operations. As a result, it presents some interesting challenges as far as business intelligence.

Interviewer:  And what have you seen or analyzed in terms of some of the future trends in BI?

Jessica Little: So presently, most of the analysts, they sit in front of the computer and they make the decisions by themselves with, pretty much, very limited collaboration with other coworkers and decision makers. In the future though, especially when we think about Facebook, Twitter, and social networking, it will be impactful.

Interviewer: Social networking, yes.

Jessica Little: The social networking phenomena and collaborative BI is definitely something that sooner or later will happen and bear fruition. Sooner or later we will see the decision makers pretty much collaborating online when it comes to making BI related decisions.

So they will not have to be at the same location but can be dispersed throughout the country or even throughout the globe and they will be looking at the same charts, collaborating, and making decisions. So that’s one direction where BI is definitely going into. The other one is visualization and analytics so that you will be able to make analytical decisions based on the visualization of data. This way you will have a much larger and bigger interaction with the actual BI tools and visual interactions than they are currently present.

Interviewer: But you won’t have to be an expert to drill down and find it because it will be a more visual presentation, correct?

Jessica Little: Correct.

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Interviewer: Yes.

Jessica Little: Yes, you don’t have to be an expert but the point is you will have your interaction with the BI tools be much more transparent and beneficial as well.