Introducing the Tableau Community’s “11th BI Trend” and poll results

It has been over a month since we published our top business intelligence trends for 2019—representing the BI trends that we believe will gain momentum in the industry in 2019 and beyond. This report was compiled from one-on-one interviews with experts in the industry, including a mix of Tableau employees, partners, and customers. This year, we explored a variety of topics ranging from data management and trust in artificial intelligence to data ethics.

We placed a poll at the bottom of each trend so you could vote on whether or not it resonated with your experience. We also gave you (the Tableau Community) the option to vote on an 11th Trend so you could share your opinion on other trends impacting the industry. Watch the recording below of our Facebook Live where we chatted with community advocates about their favorite trends and gauged their reactions to the 11th trend results.

And now the wait is over. It’s time to announce the results! Drumroll please...

We gave you the option to vote on whether a trend was “very relevant, somewhat relevant, or not relevant at this time.” After collecting all of your votes, three trends rose to the top as “very relevant” with the highest percentage of votes:

• Data storytelling is the new language of corporations: As organizations create cultures of analytics, data storytelling methods are changing. Now they’re more about nurturing a conversation around the data and less about arguing for a singular conclusion.
• Data management converges with modern BI platforms: Data curation tools and processes (like data catalogs and semantic governance) are converging with BI platforms to link data with its business context and to maintain governance at scale.
• Enterprises get smarter about analytics adoption: Leaders are redefining their definition of adoption, focusing more on impact and whether or not a BI platform changes the way people make decisions. They are measuring this through engagement activities like internal user communities.

Please note that these were the "most relevant" trends at the time of publishing and may be subject to change with additional votes.

The community has spoken. We compiled all of the votes and the winner is clear. The community-sourced 11th trend for 2019 is The demand for better predictive analytics!

Predictive capabilities are now built into self-service BI platforms including things like regression and forecasting along with integrations for data science tools like Python, R, and MATLAB to support advanced use cases. Building on the democratization of data skills and data ubiquity in self-service BI, organizations are adopting predictive analytics to support more informed decision making.

This democratization links back to our trend around the changing role of the data scientist. More people are becoming what Gartner calls citizen data scientists—people who generate models, but whose job function lies outside the field of statistics. These people aren’t replacing data scientists, but becoming key partners in developing hypotheses and communicating findings to stakeholders. This trend is another example of a common thread shaping business intelligence—the convergence of people, processes, and technology.

We want to thank everyone who participated in our polling and 11th trend survey. If you didn’t get a chance to vote, you can still share your thoughts on each of our individual trend pages and place your vote on our 11th trend page. We would love to hear from you!

For more information, read the complete report on the top business intelligence trends for 2019.