Top Business Intelligence Trends 2023:
What 1,823 BI Professionals Really Think

The Real Business Intelligence Trends in 2023

Every business is a data business. And any data business needs to use analytics to support decision-makers to take action. Deriving value from data has become an imperative for many businesses to stay competitive – more and more business strategies call for the increased use of data across their organizations.

But becoming a data-driven organization is not straightforward. This survey on the importance of trends reveals once again that practitioners value the most fundamental properties of data – security and quality as well as data strategy, data culture and data governance – much more highly than the more advanced methods and approaches for data and analytics.

The BARC Data, BI and Analytics Trend Monitor 2023 illustrates which trends are currently regarded as important in addressing these challenges by a broad group of BI and analytics professionals. Their responses provide a comprehensive picture of regional, company and industry-specific differences and offer insights into developments in the BI market and the future of BI.

Our long-term comparisons also show how trends have developed, making it possible to separate hype from stable trends. BARC’s Data, BI and Analytics Trend Monitor 2023 reflects on the business intelligence, analytics and data management trends currently driving the market from a user perspective.

The Most (and Least) Important Business Intelligence Trends in 2023

We asked 1,823 users, consultants and vendors for their views on the most important BI, analytics and data management trends, delivering an up-to-date perspective on regional, company and industry-specific differences and providing comprehensive insights on the BI, analytics and data management market.

Data quality/master data management, data-driven culture and data governance are the three topics that practitioners identified as the most important trends in their work.

At the other end of the spectrum, decision automation, mobile BI and augmented analytics were voted as the least important of the nineteen trends covered in BARC’s survey.

Master data and data quality management in first position has retained this ranking over the last six years while the second most important trend, establishing a data-driven culture, has steadily increased in importance. 

The significance of these two topics transcends individual regions and industry sectors. Establishing a data-driven culture is a trend that was newly introduced to the BARC Trend Monitor four years ago. Starting from fifth position in the first edition, it made its way up to third place three years ago and is now ranked number two. 

Data governance has also increased in importance. Having held down fourth position for several years, it rose to number three one year ago. Data discovery and visualization and self-service analytics (ranked four and five respectively) have been equally consistent trends.

Our View on the Results

Master data and data quality management has been ranked as the most important trend for six years in a row now. This is in line with findings of other BARC Surveys that repeatedly show companies are constantly battling with insufficient data quality. Hence, master data and data quality management will remain very important and is also linked to the equally stable significance of data governance, which was again ranked in third place this year.

Establishing a data-driven culture is ranked as the second most important trend. Since its introduction to the Trend Monitor in 2019, this trend has always been in the top five and is constantly gaining in prominence. This can be explained by the rising awareness that fostering a data-driven culture is vital to realizing the full data potential of a company.

Data discovery and data visualization and self-service analytics take fourth and fifth positions in our list of 19 topics, which underlines their importance. All the top trends combine organizational and technological elements. They act as a solid foundation on which most companies are keen to put great emphasis.

The top five trends represent the foundation for organizations to manage their own data and make good use of it. Furthermore, they demonstrate that organizations are aware of the relevance of high quality data and its effective use. Organizations want to go beyond the collection of as much data as possible and actively use data to improve their decision-making processes. This is also supported by data warehouse modernization, which holds on to sixth position this year. 

Some trends have increased in importance since last year. Cloud for data and analytics and data catalogs are especially hot topics, which is in line with our perception of their importance and the frequency of inquires we get.

Agile BI has dropped from rank seven to rank fourteen. Embedded BI has also fallen two places to rank fifteen. For mobile BI (eighteenth place), a continuous downward trend can be observed over the years. However, most trends have remained quite stable since last year. The overall picture indicates that companies are concentrating on the basics of securing and managing their data before they shift their priorities on to advanced methods.

In the next few weeks and months, we will post and update a series of articles looking at each trend in more detail. You will learn how different regions, industries, user types, company sizes and best-in-class companies rate the various trends and how their views have changed since last year. Sign up for our newsletter below and we’ll keep you informed about the latest articles.