Top business intelligence and data articles, 9 - 16 March

IT needs to open up business intelligence (BI) to the wider business to support its consumerisation. In doing so, BI teams can fund new initiatives and support agile working practices, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Recently Gartner made a prediction about the BI market saying that "by 2017, most business users and analysts in organizations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis". Given the current heading of the BI market, I strongly suspect they are right.

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents numerous benefits to consumers, and has the potential to change the ways that consumers interact with technology in fundamental ways. In the future, the Internet of Things is likely to meld the virtual and physical worlds together in ways that are currently difficult to comprehend.

In the last three posts (1, 2 and 3) I have shown you the responses of the interviewees. Now it is time to analyze these responses and draw some conclusions. This article is the first of three introducing the analysis I have carried out on the data I have collected.

Silicon Valley has always had a reputation for moving a little faster than the rest of the world, so much so that I've often referred to it as moving in dog years.

Drawing a comparison between a business dashboard and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Weather page might seem odd, but I'm convinced it is valid. And, more than that, I think it points a way to the future of dashboards as we use them in our businesses.

I don't mean to pick on big data. All technology has a dark side, if you let it loose. Mobile devices can be leashes or liberators (speaking as someone who once took his laptop to spring training, I count them as the latter). Sometimes I think security devices trip up [...]

In a recent LinkedIn Pulse post, Bill Nicely expressed frustration with the current Business Intelligence (BI) vogue for Data Discovery, which is being over-marketed as meaning "you don't need IT anymore" to do BI.He's right to be frustrated.

In my experience, there are two types of companies when it comes to big data: those who don't want anything to do with it (because they think it's for somebody else) and those who desperately want to implement, but don't know where to start. Regardless of where your company falls on [...]

The world is getting smarter.We've got smart phones, smart vacuum cleaners, even smart yoga mats. The marriage of data and technology is radically changing our world and making it smarter.

Alternate title: "How to solve trivial problems in an overly complicated manner"Let's set the scene... It's a Friday afternoon. Time to partake in capitalism's most sacred ritual: the happy hour. Unfortunately, so does everyone else in the city. The bar is packed. Sad face. What are we supposed to do?

Business intelligence has an engagement problem. Despite all the talk about big data revolutionizing the business world, the usage numbers for BI have remained stagnant for 10 years. Big data, or the large data sets that can be analyzed to spot trends, patterns and other correlations, can have a huge impact when it's used with BI.

By and large, people use satnavs fairly well. That's because we don't trust them too much. As I quickly discovered when I first owned one 15 years ago, a satnav can be surprisingly creative.