Guide to choosing a Business Intelligence platform
Analytics is used in millions of companies around the world to understand customer experiences and processes, find new revenue streams, and unlock competitive advantages. There is no company that can be a leader or benchmark in its sector without a good analytics system, without a good Business Intelligence platform.
In this basic guide you will find the steps to follow to choose the best Business Intelligence tool for your business. We will show you the main considerations, the different uses, the evaluation criteria and the capabilities of the BI platform.
Main considerations for choosing a Business Intelligence platform
It is absolutely necessary that you review your objectives, both short and long term, when choosing a business analytics platform. How does Business Intelligence generate value? How do you think analytics will impact your business?
You should consider whether the following points are important for your business:
Better understand key performance indicators or KPIs and what is happening in your business.
Train your staff to make better decisions.
Solve a specific business problem in your sector.
Discover hidden knowledge in your data.
Generate advanced analytics to support important strategic decisions.
Include analytics from external portals for associated companies and clients.
Generate new types of analytics for unique challenges.
Democratize analytics by integrating it into operations apps.
If you want analytics to have a widespread impact on your company, you should look for a Business Intelligence platform that helps your users become more data literate. Ask yourself questions to ensure that everyone benefits in some way or another:
Will the platform be intended for large communities of users in your company or for a small number of more qualified analysts?
Are you trying to decide which users will have access to dashboards, reports, or self-service capabilities?
Will the technological solution be limited to a specific line of business or function, or will it be part of a broader strategy?
Is your workforce mobile?
Do you want to integrate analytics into operational applications and workflows?
Who will be responsible for implementing and managing the technological solution?
Is there an executive sponsor or advisory board to guide the process and remove barriers?
And regarding the actual cost of the Business Intelligence platform, you should take into account software licensing and maintenance, third-party products, underlying technologies required, hardware costs (including production and development servers, as well as maintenance) , internal recurring support costs, implementation costs, recurring costs for SaaS products, user training, and networking, computing, and storage costs.
What you should ask yourself about self-service analytics
Self-service analytics environments enable users to explore data and make discoveries securely, empowering them as business analysts and analytics creators. Before choosing the Business Intelligence platform, ask yourself:
Can users bring together many different data sources to analyze using a visual interface?
When combining sources, can users be sure that there are no losses or errors in the data?
Can users upload "bad" data without having to model or clean it first?
Does it have a full set of data transformation capabilities?
Do you have extensive connectivity options for file-based, on-premises, and cloud sources?
Is there a central repository of secure data sources available to users?
Do you have a wide range of visualizations such as bar or line charts, scatter plots, heat maps, histograms, etc.?
Do visualizations inherently summarize the overall state of the data set and help identify outliers?
Is the creation of the interface intuitive, with drag & drop functionalities and simple properties or menus?
Can users post and share content with their team and other teams?
Does it have interactive data storytelling? Is it based on real-time analytics or is it static in nature?
About dashboards and analytics applications
Guided analytics apps and interactive dashboards enable you to search and explore data, uncovering patterns, connections, and insights that drive actionable business decisions.
The questions we recommend you ask yourself before choosing the Business Intelligence platform are:
Are simple, natural, interactive selections available in all visualizations, charts, and objects?
Can users explore without restrictions, in a non-linear and free way as opposed to a restrictive linear path? Can you reduce data dynamically and allow the same applications to be deployed with different subsets of data to users based on their assigned rights?
Can users perform comparative analysis (compare multiple sets)?
Can data and visualizations be packaged and deployed together within applications?
Do you have application-level controls and functionality to create an interactive experience, including sliders, buttons, layout options, etc.?
Can multiple keyword searches be performed to expose relationships between data?
Do you offer natural language interactions?
Customized and integrated analytics for a Business Intelligence platform
With open and standard APIs, you can create fully customized apps for any situation and purpose. Plus, with built-in analytics you can combine dashboards and visualizations into your operational apps, allowing even more users to make more discoveries in your data. Software and application developers will create custom, integrated analytics that will benefit everyone in your company.
Did you know that integrated analytics improves the speed of decision-making by 22%?
Reports and alerts from the Business Intelligence tool
Creating reports is essential to monitor business performance. Therefore, it is important that the chosen Business Intelligence platform helps generate reports and alerts in an intuitive and simple way.
Ask yourself if the BI tool:
Does it support a wide variety of reporting formats?
Do you have an intuitive report development environment with a wide range of authoring features?
Do you have advanced reporting capabilities such as banding, scripting, and advanced formatting?
Does the reporting environment take advantage of the analytics and objects already developed in the core platform applications?
Can information from multiple analytics apps be combined into a single report?
Can reports be scheduled or prepared in conditional mode based on the data?
Can reports be delivered through multiple channels?
Do you have advanced distribution capabilities, such as cycles to generate report sets?
Can users receive alerts or notifications based on data set conditions?