Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) software is increasingly becoming indispensable to organisations seeking to be more data-driven. Accordingly, software vendors are working hard to ensure their products can provide actionable insights from analytics, communicate the results, and support the internal communication and collaboration between functions when needed.

The amount of data generated throughout today’s manufacturing process – from product development to production and post-sales support – is astonishing. That said, the capabilities to utilise such data volume is not yet catching up. For instance, an oil-exploration company was able to collect more than 30,000 pieces of data from one single drilling rig. Most of that data, however, was wasted.

Company culture can dictate how data-ready is your organisation. To increase the success rate of analytic application, speed up the adoption and guide the company away from technological pitfalls, you need to build a strong, healthy data culture.

What makes an organisation stand out and lead today's economy lies in the way they use their data. It is a fact that we are sitting on endless streams of valuable insights but we are unable to process them all. Some of us are doing better than others in leveraging advanced technologies to get the needed information while others are still struggling with the basics.

You’ve heard of Digital Transformation, but do you know what comes after it? A long leap in technology will result in more changes in both IT ops and DevOps. From the vendors’ point of view, they have to adopt a new vision, from simply focusing on big data or machine learning, to the inception of a new generation of platforms that unify both of the technologies.

And the changing pace will only escalate drastically, leading to the rise of AIOps.

Networked Business Intelligence (BI) leverages new capabilities to truly combine the centralised and decentralised models of BI, delivering the best aspects of both: end-user self-service without analytical silos. It is a new approach to analytics based on the idea that trusted and well governed data is not at odds with speed and ease of use.

Birst’s Connected Data Prep empowers business people to access and prepare data with a user-friendly, visual experience that eliminates the need for complicated scripting. Not only that, with Connected Data Prep you can network your analytics with data from colleagues, other departments, or your IT organisation, enriching your insights for smarter, more trusted decisions.

The data lake concept centers on landing all analysable data sets of any kind in raw or only lightly processed form into the easily expandable scale-out Hadoop infrastructure to ensure that the fidelity of the data is preserved.

Since its inception, the primary objective of business intelligence has been the creation of a top-down single source of truth from which organisations would centrally track KPIs and performance metrics with static reports and dashboards. This stemmed from the proliferation of data in spreadsheets and reporting silos throughout organisations, often yielding different and conflicting results. With this new mandate, BI-focused teams were formed, often in IT departments, and they began to approach the problem in the same manner as traditional IT projects, where the business makes a request of IT, IT logs a ticket, then fulfils the request following a waterfall methodology.

Known as the technology behind bitcoin, blockchain has created a profound impact on the financial industry and beyond. But its potential is much more far-reaching and not limited to cryptocurrency. As blockchain continues to evolve, the list of its business applications just keeps expanding.