What do you think should be next?
Personally, I think mobile is important, but I think discovery and continuing work in the "smarts" arena are key. Help me infer questions and answers and help me summarize data in unexpected (and useful) ways. I think if we can continue evolving the tools that can "sense" a relationship between data elements, that would be a huge point of leverage.
Forgetting all "yeah, but how would you do it" stuff for a minute, if we could crowdsource the digging around in information… from the questions to the reporting to other ways information is used, that would be amazing. Perhaps an online service that learns how people are using their information and then can feed it into your local analysis process. Now that would be really cool and helpful. The payoff, potentially, would be incredible.
You’d need to have a way to protect the data from the process, but still make the suggestions meaningful in the context of your own systems. But if your systems could, for example, recognize sales data and then go look for interesting correlations in sales data elements and present those to you, that would be pretty powerful.
I like to think that IBM’s Watson is working in this area, learning as it goes and then applying those lessons to new areas of information (I don’t know that it is, I just hope it is). If we could start using input from all of us that are building and rebuilding these reports and processes, the leverage would be incredible.
So, I’ll ask – is this even possible?