Data Analytics: 2022 Trends and Opportunities

Ranked as the No. 1 Business Intelligence company in terms of customer success, Sisense has also been named one of the Forbes’ Cloud 100, The World’s Best Cloud Companies, six years in a row.

As Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Sisense, Ashley Kramer leads the go to market and product strategy, brand awareness and revenue growth. Ashley has more than 15 years of executive and technical experience at organisations such as Tableau, Alteryx, Amazon, Oracle and NASA.

Kramer suggests there will be three major shifts in data-driven organisations in 2022. Lets dive deeper into these...

1. Organisations will redefine what it means to build a "culture of analytics" 

For too long, business leaders have assumed that upskilling their workforce with data classes/certifications and investing in self-service tools would lead to a data-driven organisation. They are finally ready to admit that it's not working. Self-service BI does not "close the skills gap." Not everyone has time or interest in becoming a data analyst or data literate, especially now in today's post-COVID landscape where teams are understaffed and people are valuing their time differently in and outside of work. 

In 2022, organisations will redefine what it means to build a "culture of analytics" and change the paradigm by bringing insights to workers in a more digestible way - turning to methods and solutions like embedded analytics that won’t require them to learn new skills or invest additional time. 

2. The most data-driven organisations will combat tool fatigue by bringing data to workers where they are

The rise of work-from-home and the digital acceleration brought on by the pandemic means that more people than ever are using different tools in different places to do their jobs - from email to collaboration software like Slack and Teams to the many point solutions needed to get work done across departments. As a result, workers everywhere are experiencing tool fatigue, distractions and inefficiencies from jumping around from software to software or being forced to use tools that don’t fit into their personal workflow. 

Rather than investing in data/analytics solutions that add yet another tool to the mix, we'll start to see more organisations in 2022 delivering insights to employees directly within their workflows via embedded analytics (for example, directly within Slack, Teams, etc.). In this environment, workers can make data-driven decisions without thinking twice and without any disruptions. 

3. Automation turns prescriptive analytics into prescriptive guidance. 

For years we heard that the future of analytics will go beyond descriptive analytics (what happened) and predictive analytics (what will happen) to prescriptive guidance (what to do about it). AI combined with automation will finally make this possible by dynamically combining relevant data and alerting knowledge workers to take action, in advance, before an event occurs. Customer Service reps will be notified to reach out to potentially angry customers before they even call in. 

Sales leaders will react immediately to dips in revenue pipeline coverage due to upstream activities without waiting until the end of the quarter. Retail managers can optimise inventory before items sell out by combining more than just sales data, such as purchasing patterns of other items, external market trends, and even competing promotional campaigns. Prescriptive analytics will finally evolve from telling us just where the numbers are going, to helping us make smarter, proactive decisions.