How To Select BI Software? Selecting Business Intelligence (BI) software isn’t that easy as it helps companies watch out for the overall progress to make the best decisions.
Business Intelligence helps companies achieve their business goals and take their mission and vision to the next level.
Business Intelligence BI Software unites modern business methodologies and techniques, online analytical processing, and data warehousing platforms to empower corporations to make better decisions for the company.
To help your company on How To Select BI Software, we have come up with 3 smart hacks that will actually help your business to select Business Intelligence Software to meaningful insights.
3 Hacks To Select BI Software For Your Company
1.Identify your most frequent needs and use cases
Before choosing or selecting a Business Intelligence BI software or tool, ask yourself some important questions like:
- What are the key reports you are viewing?
- What data visualization tools do you need (bar charts, line charts, diagrams, histograms, spatial charts, heatmaps)?
- Are your reports a simple summary or a complex one?
- What features do you use the most: daily reports by e-mail, alert by e-mail, integrated dashboards)?
Below are some standard features available in the market. You must therefore make sure that these correspond to your use cases.
- Data visualizations
- Filtering and exploration: It is possible to filter a report by different custom values or navigate a detailed report from a more global report offering an overview.
- Pivot table: possibility to create information from a list of dimensions and measures.
- Scheduled Email: Ability to prepare a report and send it by email to a group of recipients. Useful for sending a daily status email to management.
- Email Alert: Ability to send an email, slack, or message alerts when there are sudden changes or out of the expected behavior of your data (for example, when there are impressive drops in sales).
2. Data Storage Policy
Do you need to determine how your data will be stored? For example, do you already have a database? Or do you want to use the one supplied with the software?
Some BI software solutions can import your data into their software from an existing database and generate reports from there. This saves you configuration time compared to a clean data infrastructure.
However, it works great if your data is small and fragmented. But as your data grows, the cost incurred will also increase. Since your information is stored in the BI tool, you limit the tool’s functionality.
Furthermore, the above-made since many years ago, when setting up a data warehouse was expensive (a data warehouse license could reach several thousand dollars). But over time, the cost of building these data warehouses has decreased with the arrival of Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, or Apache’s Hadoop ecosystem. Businesses are also making their own data infrastructure as they grow.
Switching to your own data warehouse has its advantages. You are no longer committed to a particular BI provider, and you can configure several different tools at the same time to meet your needs. Your data analyst can thus set up your own storage policy by developing modules directly within your data warehouse.
3. Report creation process
Are you asking who will be in charge of creating these reports? Will they be technically capable (Excel macros, SQL queries, etc.), or will they be non-technical profiles (preferring a “drag & drop,” for example)?
Some users prefer a drag & drop interface to create reports. These are quick and convenient, mostly when your data is extracted correctly and formatted. However, more technical profiles will be needed when you are faced with corrupted or unformatted data.
That is why some other technical users prefer more customizable report preparation methods, where they can write an SQL query to extract data.
SQL is the de facto language used when it comes to working with data. With an SQL server, you can generate reports in any format, and from there, you can do whatever you want with them (pivot tables, analyze charts, etc.).
How To Select Right BI Software
To make your business intelligence project successful and sound, you must have a solid plan. Furthermore, this plan must be incorporated with the company’s mission, vision, and goals.
When a company is thinking of choosing business intelligence software, one should keep in mind the internal data sources from the accounting or ERP system and all other unstructured data available.
The selection of BI software for the company is a long-term strategy.
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