Predictions and Plans for Business Analytics in 2011

I'll highlight how I'm addressing the principal business-analytics trends that I discussed with him-self service, pervasive, social, scalable, cloud, and real-time-in our 2011 Forrester research agenda:

• Self-service analytics: Multichannel customer relationship management (CRM) is a huge focus for us at Forrester. In customer-facing business processes, the self-service portal channel is key to delivering personalized service, speeding transactions, and enhancing the customer experience. Self-service analytics, delivered through the portal, can help your customers to evaluate the various options available to them, and also to compare your offerings against those of the competition. Likewise, self-service business intelligence (BI) can help your staff to quickly drill down on issues relevant to customer satisfaction and to identify the "next best offer" in each customer interaction. ...
• Pervasive analytics: You can't optimize customer relationships if you don't make analytics pervasive across all channels, touchpoints, transactions, and business processes. In 2011, we will publish Forrester reports that provide a business case, architecture, and guidelines for enterprises who are looking to embed predictive analytics in all business processes, both customer-facing and back-office.
• Social analytics: Traditional BPM resembles top-down social engineering-in other words, process reengineering opportunities are traditionally identified by management, processes are changed and automated by technologists, and new processes pushed onto employees and customers. In 2011 and beyond, Forrester sees BPM evolving rapidly toward a more social architecture to support routing, approval, and exception handling.
• Scalable analytics: Big data is the rage everywhere, but I prefer to think of it as "colossal content," because it includes much more than structured relational tables. The enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is scaling inexorably toward petabytes to support the increasingly complex content databases required by social media analytics, geospatial applications, clickstream crunching, and other leading-edge applications. Clearly, Hadoop, as an emerging platform for content that is both colossal and complex, is a key technology. In fact, Hadoop is increasingly figuring into enterprise roadmaps for scaling their EDWs. Forrester is closely tracking the emergence of enterprise grade Hadoop products from IBM, Pentaho, Cloudera, Karmasphere, and others.