Paul Harapin shares his three predictions for what will happen in analytics in 2017.

Data has become a big deal for companies of all sizes. In this environment of opportunity but also uncertainty, organisations are faced with greater demands for information from customers and employees alike. Stakeholders want information on demand or in ‘real time’ to optimise business outcomes, without having to rely on complex software or human gatekeepers to gain access to relevant information.

Some organisations have taken the lead in addressing these challenges by creating comprehensive strategies to ensure all decision makers across the organisation are able to benefit from access to relevant data and analytics. The intent is to enable decisions and actions that move the organisation toward strategic or operational goals, such as improved vendor or customer relationships, reduced operational costs, or optimised investments for innovation.

The pace of change within the analytics industry doesn’t look set to do anything but accelerate. Here are my top three trends to look out for in 2017:

1. Dynamic visualisation

Businesses will continue to demand deeper insights and analytics from their data quicker to enable them to make better business decisions. Business users will be able to further utilise raw data to make more accurate informed decisions based on real-time data through the power of business optimisation. Additionally, data visualisation tools will become more than just pretty graphs — giving us the right answers, dynamically, as trends change. We expect to see truly dynamic dashboards become the new visualisation standard. They’ll populate automatically with charts built from scratch. Graphs will depict real time (to the minute) changes as they happen. Hidden insights can be gleaned that otherwise would have been missed by human analysts or  ignored by a usual dashboard array.

2. Renewed push for API standards

As software becomes even more integrated, it is likely we will see a growing call for API Standards. These standards will only benefit consumers and businesses, as businesses look to integrate world-leading software or products into their offerings to tie together in an ecosystem that is fast and flexible. Furthermore, this open standard will allow the free passage of information and enable businesses to drill even further down into their data.

3. AoE – analytics of everything

In 2017, we are likely to see the increasing use of analytics in every app, SaaS, and IoT product. This is something we are already seeing in personal apps, such as banking and health apps, but this will start to become more prevalent across the enterprise. Building on analytics successes in discrete disciplines, organisations will start to take serious steps toward connecting these successes to create something bigger – going beyond the selective use of insights to fuel decision-making in individual parts of the business. Organisations will deploy a tightly knitted combination of strategy, people, processes, and data – in addition to technology – to deliver insights at the point of action every day, everywhere in the organisation.