#1 The Persistent Deployment of Analytics:

To make analytics more actionable and pervasively deployed, BI and analytics professionals must make analytics more invisible and transparent to their users — through easy natural language interfaces for exploring data and through embedded analytic applications at the point of decision or action.

As analytics moves closer to the point of action in real time, a shift is occurring from systems that primarily aggregate and compute structured data, toward analytic systems that correlate and relate structured and unstructured data, and reason, learn and deliver prescriptive advice. These man-machine partnerships are emerging and becoming increasingly sophisticated in ways that position the machine or application to take more natural inputs, such as written or spoken questions, extending analytics to nontraditional users.

The friendlier, more transparent and therefore more invisible the analytics are to users, the more broadly they will be adopted — particularly by users that have never used BI tools — and the greater the impact analytics can have on business activities.

Moving toward something that looks simple and invisible from the user's perspective will require a great deal of computing power, extended capabilities and skills, and potential complexity in information management systems.

Business intelligence and analytics professionals should begin by identifying targeted data exploration and high-value decision-making opportunities where making analytics invisible, transparent, context-aware and accessible in real time to specific constituencies can add demonstrable value.

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