Critical Challenges in BI Today

Bangalore: BI tools are becoming popular especially with the economic difficulties prevailing today. They are widely used to help business organizations to either cut cost or increase their sales. Forrester Research expects BI revenue to increase to $12 billion in 2014. Although BI is gaining popularity, many companies are facing challenges.

Wiliam McKnight in his article in b-eye-network.com brought forward some of the critical challenges in BI.

1.    Maintaining Performance Level
With the volume of data increasing daily, maintaining sufficient performance level is the most critical challenge in Business Intelligence. Business organizations are looking for various alternatives to manage structured data. Some of the popular alternatives are in-memory databases, data warehouse appliances and columnar databases.

2.    Data Integration
Data Integration is a major challenge to the BI industry today. Business organizations are looking for various ways to store data without consolidating it in a data warehouse.

3.    High Interests in the Cloud
Many businesses are moving to the cloud to manage data integration and access components. Many of them have doubts regarding the security of their data when stored on-premises. Within the next five years, cloud and virtual deployment will store at least one-third of corporate databases.

4.    Centralized Master Data
Having a centralized master data will help govern the process for MDM (Master Data management). Concerns arising from centralizing master data are whether companies needs to build their own master data or whether they can be used widely.

5.    Coping with the Increasing Data
Companies are working tirelessly to cope with the increasing data especially from the sensor, the social media and web activities. Often these data are termed as the “big three forms of unstructured or semi-structured big data.”