The future of Business Intelligence is certainly bright and the chances are great, because organisations are expanding, datas are growing everywhere and managers need to maintain the control. Plus, it will take some time for those IT business solutions to enter more fully into market, because knowledge of these tools by end users is still very low. But must be changes to adapt solutions to market needs. The change must be focused on getting more user-friendly applications for end users, get a lower cost level and a licensing system that allows to give information to the entire staff of a company, without increasing cost of ownership. And with fulminant development of what is called social media, I think that there is an unprecedented goldmine of data. Why? Because customers are telling you what they want. And so you can know what people expect of your brand, who wants to test your product, who likes/dislikes your brand/product etc. But for that you have to be able to understand it. Social Media has impacts across nearly all functions of a business - not just Marketing and PR, but Sales, Service, Product Development, R&D, and many others.
So, for my point of view, next generation of Business Intelligence will be more of a hybrid, holistic tool melding BI, Enterprise Performance/Process Management and Information Management - a more singular application providing all organizational data in real-time with the collaborative advantages of event/activity streams and social utilities, putting business-critical data directly into decision-maker's hands, all on a singular dashboard. Plus, it will integrate internal data with external data (Industry Data, Social Media, Blogs ...) and it has to be mobile as well.
