If you want to know what is going on within business analytics, you can read an article, a report from an analysis firm, or a white paper from a vendor (like SAS). It can all be very enlightening, but to me it will never have the same effect as listening to stories and insights from people who actually ”get their hands dirty” working in the field.

Arne Löfgren is a senior business manager with Accenture, a large global consulting and technology firm and SAS alliance partner. He gets in touch with many top managers across different industries, working with them to implement new business strategies and IT systems. At SAS Forum, I got the chance to interview him and learned some interesting things about the current challenges and opportunities.

Here are the 3 business analytics trendsmentioned by Arne Löfgren that I found particularly interesting:

1. An experimental approach. Companies are struggling with lack of transparency and old IT structures. They are realizing that it is not possible to plan and structure everything in the beginning of the project and a more experimental and agile approach to business analytics is therefore gaining ground.
2. Line of business is taking over. Where big data and the strategies around them used to be an IT matter, managers in line of business are now taking over. They are the people who know where the value in data can be found. Consequently, IT is becoming more business oriented.
3. The data warehouse is less needed. The ”old-fashioned data warehouse”, as Arne Löfgren calls it, is not as popular as it has been. It builds on the assumption that we can actually plan one structure that serves all our needs. In reality, we need a much more agile and open approach to explore the data.

Watch the video to get more insights from Arne Löfgren.