Today, Business Intelligence (BI) is critical to any organization’s decision-making structure. But there are many things that you need to consider before jumping into the BI game.

Business intelligence has become integral to companies of all shapes and sizes. They use it to understand customer preferences, improve operations, and increase profitability. As more and more information is digitized, the importance of business intelligence is growing exponentially. 50% of all businesses have adopted BI tools, and projections indicate significant growth in the future.

The demand for BI tools that generate meaningful insights and make it easy for users to understand data has grown multifold. At the same time, the market is flooded with different BI tools with various features and functionalities. Selecting between these BI tool features requires research and introspection on the business’s needs.

Today’s article will discuss the five questions you must ask yourself before investing in a business intelligence project.

1. Is it designed for business users/non-technical users?

Most BI tools in the market today require some level of coding knowledge. Hence, the demand for skilled data analysts and BI developers has increased exponentially.

Experienced data analysts usually charge up to $100,000 as an annual salary. That makes them unaffordable for most business owners. In addition, writing SQL or native BI platform languages such as DAX (for Power BI) is challenging since it requires extensive practice & experience. The business must depend on experts to do the work and undertake simple activities such as generating charts or graphs related to the data.

While selecting BI tools, companies should check the ease with which business users can work with data and generate insights. For example, business users should be able to perform ad-hoc analysis by performing regular slicing and dicing without technical help.

1. Is it agile enough for any ad-hoc analysis?

Traditional business intelligence reports can sometimes be highly technical. Only data analysts can navigate through them to find actionable insights. Users must create custom reports whenever a question arises and manually extract data. This makes ad-hoc analysis extremely cumbersome. 

A self-service business analytics tool helps businesses maneuver complex reports and find insights for specific business questions. Today, business users need a guided search bar to quickly connect with data and get whatever they need.

1. Does it take a lot of time to generate insights?

Most BI tools require businesses to deploy extensive effort & resources, which might only be possible for some businesses owing to limited time and spending capacity. Add to this the time spent on training people; it can take months for organizations to generate actionable insights.

Since there are multiple layers of truth to any data, the time to gather relevant insights goes up exponentially. When one recognizes an existing problem, a new one comes up.

By having a modern BI solution that connects data sources, configures, and analyzes data for defined user role access, one can start generating accurate business insights at one-fifth the cost & time.

1. Does it come with my industry/ function domain knowledge?

Another big challenge with current BI tools is that they need to provide domain-specific KPIs and metrics. This forces business users to reinvent the wheel whenever they want to generate a new report or perform any analysis.

Businesses today need an intelligent BI tool with pre-built plug-n-play, industry-specific, off-the-shelf KPIs that can help them quickly generate high-quality insights. Baked domain KPIs make the deployment process fast and help businesses get started on insights immediately.

1. Is it reactive or proactive?

Most of the current BI tools are reactive, i.e., they require business users to work for the tool to get the insights they want. Also, the insights generated by traditional BI tools are reactive, providing insights only when business users ask questions.

A proactive, self-learning business intelligence tool delivers business performance deviations in natural language, generating high-quality insights without the business user asking for them.

Business intelligence’s future lies in providing actionable insights to the right stakeholders at the right time automatically and proactively.

Final Thoughts

Organizations must ask these critical questions before investing in a business intelligence project. Choosing a tool that adequately addresses all the above concerns is essential.

Therefore, choosing a modern business analytics platform that even non-technical team members can access is crucial, thereby improving the organization’s overall productivity. Our Search-based BI and Analytics proprietary platform INSIA fulfills all the above-mentioned requirements. Click here to try us for free!