BI 2012 Predictions – No Way!

It’s that time of year when every analyst worth his or her salt is making predictions for the coming year.  Acquisitions.  Big data.  Mobile BI.  Cloud.  Social media.  Predictive analytics… hey! Wait a minute!

It’s that time of year when every analyst worth his or her salt is making predictions for the coming year.  Acquisitions.  Big data.  Mobile BI.  Cloud.  Social media.  Predictive analytics… hey! Wait a minute!

My question is: how many of these predictions about BI 2012 are based on the use of predictive analytics?  My hunch is… none.  Perhaps I’m being unfair?  Is it predictive analytics to use all those surveys of buying intentions as input?  What about using trend numbers for market share over the past few years? 

So, here is the Wikipedia definition: “Predictive analytics is an area of statistical analysis that deals with extracting information from data and using it to predict future trends and behavior patterns. The core of predictive analytics relies on capturing relationships between explanatory variables and the predicted variables from past occurrences, and exploiting it to predict future outcomes.”  What do you think?  How is the fit?