By 2012, emerging technologies will make it easier to build and consume analytical applications lessening IT’s role in building these applications, according to Gartner, Inc.

"Evidence suggests that BI is used aggressively by just 15 to 20 percent of business users. For the BI sector to thrive, it needs to overcome the fact that most business users feel BI tools are hard to use," said Kurt Schlegel, research director at Gartner.

Much of the innovation in the BI space will come from emerging technologies that will make it easier for users to build and consume their own reports and analytical applications. In particular, five technologies — interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software as a service (SaaS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) — will help drive mainstream BI adoption.

"However, as a result of this innovation, individuals and workgroups will be less dependent on central IT departments to meet their BI requirements," said Schlegel. "BI teams need to understand how to leverage these emerging technologies to drive BI adoption, but do it in a way that doesn’t undermine the organisation’s existing BI architecture and standards."

Interactive visualisation will be quickly accepted during the next two years as a common front end to analytical application, driven by the ubiquity of rich Internet applications. With its attractive display, it should be more widely adopted by users who aren't accustomed to the grid style of analysis and reporting offered by relational databases and spreadsheets.

Smaller companies that lack the base of investments in BI systems will increasingly turn to service companies to deliver services that integrate, analyze and report on data from numerous systems. Wider adoption of SaaS business models will make analytical applications more widely used, particularly among midsize companies.

SOA, coupled with a move toward a model-driven architecture, based on a visual "drag-and-drop" development style, will make it easier to build BI applications. A proliferation of this drag-and-drop style of development will drive resurgence in departmental analytical application development.