I love reporters. As someone with an M.A. in journalism who then evolved into an analyst, I recognize that both professions occupy approximately the same tier in the industry food chain. In fact, many IT industry analysts were trade press reporters at one point in their careers, and it’s not uncommon for analysts to go back into media institutions later on.

When great longtime IT reporters, such as Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan, call me up to get my thoughts, I’m just as interested in their take on what’s important. Jai recently published an excellent article with my predictions, plus those of another analyst, on the year ahead in analytics. To the jaded reader, these sorts of year-end look-ahead articles may feel like perfunctory rehashes of stuff we’ve been telling them for quite some time, perhaps with a trendy new buzzword thrown in to keep it remotely glance-worthy.

I try not to repeat myself too much. Rather than regurgitate the statements I made in the phone interview with Jai, I’ll highlight how I’m addressing the principal business-analytics trends that I discussed with him — self-service, pervasive, social, scalable, cloud, and real-time—in our 2011 Forrester research agenda: