As the year draws to a close, it's time for all of those "looking back at the trends of the prior year" stories.

As the year draws to a close, it's time for all of those "looking back at the trends of the prior year" stories. There's a good review of business intelligence trends on the TDWI website. Like most lists of this type, it's a good starting point for a discussion on tweaking your IT strategies to improve them in the coming year.

The most interesting of the five trends falls right in the middle of the list, and it's one that can make IT managers a hero – or a goat. It also relates directly to the trend that precedes it on the list, stagnant adoption rates for BI. According to research from the Business Application Research Council (BARC), just 10 percent of enterprises have deployed BI to a majority of their users.

The article attributes widespread dissatisfaction with BI as usual as a primary reason for sluggish adoption rates. It cites a study by Dresner Advisory Services that found a growing number of business users are purchasing BI software on their own, often software-as-a-service or open source solutions.

This means that the workgroup vs. platform debate is far from over. It's leading to an approach the article calls "insurgent" BI in which a slew of new vendors including Bis2 Inc., WhereScape Inc., Kapow Inc. and Expressor Software Corp. are introducing solutions designed to be deployed with minimal assistance from IT.

Of course, this approach can lead to problems down the road if these solutions create data quality or integration issues. Instead, it's better for the IT department and business users to hash out their differences and agree to keep their BI activities as transparent as possible.

In addition to slow BI adoption and insurgent BI, TDWI's other three trends are:

• Speciality data warehouses, a trend created by marrying Big Data with advanced analytics and signaled by software giants like IBM, SAP and EMC buying specialists like Netezza, Sybase and Greenplum Software
• Social BI, in which users (again) drive interest in adding social features such as tagging, sharing, commenting and rating to BI software
• Mobile BI, a trend that has been around for a while but hadn't taken off until the introduction of Apple's iPad