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Futurecasting is one of my favorite things. My co-workers claim I rewrite the future on a daily basis and nothing makes me happier than predicting the future of the very industry that I work in.

I see 2012 as a ‘redefining year’ (and that’s not just because it could be our last): what was once a very staid, stable industry now includes more than 265 vendors, many with offerings that are much more than your typical ‘traditional’ data warehouse and reports.

BI demand remain strong but, from what the analysts tell me, the demand for the ‘traditional’ stuff is flat. Apparently most of the market growth in BI is what I’d call “New BI”, nascent but fast-growing categories that support more focused needs and emerging technologies.

With all of that in mind, I’ve decided to break down my predictions along the lines of a few of these “New BI” categories. I hope to follow up some of these general predictions with more details in a separate blog…assuming the end-of-the-world doesn’t happen first. Read fast, your days are numbered.

Big BI Gets Stolen

I predict the BI industry will steal the Big Data hype in 2012, calling it something like “Big BI”. This won’t be a developer-centric Hadoop approach, but rather about getting data into (Big ETL). They’ll move beyond the tactical Hadoop jobs and start looking into a new generation of Big Data systems such as Greenplum, Vertica, Cassandra, HBase and Hive. The No-SQL guys will create a swarm of Big Data analytic startups and, like many industry trends, create more buzzword-confusion along the way.

Mobile BI Wins the Goldilocks Award

We’ve talked about it for a while but I predict Mobile BI will truly take off in 2012. The ‘just right’ combination of form factor, availability and technology will make the iPad the fastest-growing BI dashboard deployment target – fulfilling a promise made long ago: immediate access to BI data, anytime, anywhere. And organizations will offer large subsidies so employees can buy their own tablets (ok, maybe this past part is just wishful thinking on my part).

Live Data Becomes the Majority

For a while it seemed that ‘Real-Time Data’ was destined to remain in the hands of pocket-protector-wearing scientists running non-stop stock-trading algorithms. I predict those days are over and a new generation of Real-Time Business Dashboards will go mainstream in 2012, connecting live operational information to tactical and strategic KPIs and Scorecards. These dashboards will make ‘old, dated data’ something that only a small minority will accept, and it will also expand the BI footprint into areas of organizations that never embraced the less-timely methods of traditional BI.

Analytics Get Limber

One of the most promising areas of is BI analytics, with great promise for true business insight of the past, present and perhaps even the future. But analytics to date seem to be over-structured, based upon knowing the questions in advance of actually seeing the data. Yep, I predict that in 2012 we move to a more balanced analytics approach, a kind of ‘Model Free Analytics’ that requires little (or no) up-front preparation like pre-built analytic models or data preparation. This new generation of flexible analytics enables organizations to dynamically analyze information as it’s happening.