Come gather ’round, people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

— Bob Dylan

The times are a-changin’ indeed. The sweltering heat of summer will soon give way to a more forgiving fall, kids will return to school, and the trees will shed their leaves. Changes around us are inevitable, so it’s important to position your business to thrive in the face of often unpredictable market shifts. Be prepared to take up measures like saying goodbye to legacy data governance practices in favor of smarter ambient solutions or refreshing your knowledge on text analytics solutions and capabilities to help map your specific use cases to the right tech.

This month’s Insights Beat highlights some major changes across market landscapes and features some of our latest research on data and analytics technologies and strategies.

Keep Up With Changes In The BI Market

The BI market has seen a flurry of M&A activity in recent months. Looker was acquired by Google. Tableau was purchased by Salesforce. Logi Analytics and Zoomdata are now one. Boris Evelson offered his thoughts on all of this upheaval and how to best protect your BI investments in a recently published report. Along with this new report, Boris also published two Forrester Wave™ evaluations to help your firm create a shortlist of client-managed and vendor-managed BI vendors.

Make Smart Cities More Insights-Driven 

The “smart city” tag is no more. In her most recent report, Jennifer Belissent expanded on the rise of the “insights-driven” city, in which city leaders leverage data to better understand the needs of their constituents and deliver services more efficiently and effectively. From data-optimized snow removal in a Finnish city to a Viennese chatbot designed to help answer users’ questions and assist in routing, the insights-driven city is poised to touch on virtually every aspect of the citizen-government relationship. How do we get there? Embracing new and emerging technology is part of the equation — government officials would benefit from adopting technologies like the internet of things and location intelligence to drive better insights to better understand their citizens’ needs.

Check out our latest research, and stay tuned for next month’s Insights Beat. Our team, along with other data and analytics industry leaders, will also be at our Data Strategy & Insights 2019 Forum on November 5–6 in Austin, Texas. Join us there to continue the conversation!

(Jeremy Vale and Aldila Yunus contributed to this post.)