Gartner: Better BI tools on the way

A new Gartner study finds that the role of corporate IT units in business intelligence will be shrinking. In its place, search and collaboration tools will allow individual users and business units to build their own analytical applications, according to the study released last week. Gartner said that it expects this change to occur by 2012. By then, users will turn to interactive visualization, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, Software as a service and service-oriented architectures to build their own reports. Search and collaboration tools, probably off-the-shelf, will allow individual users and business units to build their own applications. "Evidence suggests that BI is used aggressively by just 15-20 percent of business users," said Kurt Schlegel, an analyst at Gartner, in a statement. "For the BI sector to thrive, it needs to overcome the fact that most business users feel BI tools are hard to use." And we bet that BI tools will get much cheaper, too.

For more on BI tools to come:
- See this ComputerWorld article