2015 Corporate Performance Management Trends

Time is flying, and we’re already in the second month of the new year.  2015 is moving at a rapid pace, especially, it seems, in the business world.  Between the holidays, new budgets, preparations for the next milestone or event, and visiting with a customer or partner, you might feel a little bit lost in the blur.  With all that is going on, you are still responsible for the big picture task of remaining competitive and relevant in your market, and that involves detailed data analysis.  In this article, we’ll focus on the most important trends for corporate performance management in today’s business world, so that you and your team can be on the cutting edge of trends and trajectories for Business Intelligence (BI) processes, like financial report writing, planning, data visualizing, and data warehousing.

Firstly, Gartner recently surveyed 3,000 CIOs about priorities they have for the new year, and the results spoke to the importance of data management and analysis. For another year in a row, BI/Analytics is the number one priority for CIOs in 2015.  The rest of the top 5 included Infrastructure and Data Center, Cloud, ERP, and Mobile technologies.  These results all indicate that BI is still such a relevant element in the culture of business, for all areas, departments, and roles.  This sustained interest and investment in BI processes and solutions means that you should stay in the know about the right solutions for your particular data management and analyses, so you can make the best investment for your company’s place in the industry.  Let’s talk about the most important developments that will have an impact on BI software in 2015.

It doesn’t take a rocket data scientist.  Over the years, data analyses had to jump through the hoops of specialists and experts, involving a data analyst to understand corporate analytics to get an idea of how the company is doing.  Today’s software experience empowers business end users to engage with, manage, and analyze operational and transactional data on their own.  With BI processes connecting and building on each other, you can expect to see overlaps of financial reporting, planning, data visualizing and warehousing in business user friendly aggregations with diverse types of data, predictive analytics, and data discovery.

Third Party Software Vendors Will Target Business Users, Not IT.  Similarly, rather than Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) marketing their product to the IT department, professionals, in the finance department and beyond, all the way up to the executive level, will be sculpting the next chapter of BI tools.  We’re already seeing this at full steam ahead, as products are easier to use, so the IT middlemen can be cut out of the process.  There’s little to no need for expertise in coding or SQL because BI solutions are more dynamic and intuitive for the end user than previously designed.  Relatedly, you can expect to see analyses become more easily and speedily digestible, relying on visualization and narratives.  You might call this trend “show and tell for the professional.”

To continue learning more about the top accounting and business trends for 2015, read the rest of this article here.

by Solver, Inc.