Data is a vital component of every enterprise decision today. With every click in the transactional system, the data is instantly generated and stored in large systems called databases. Raw data in itself is useless and simply exists to fill up the storage.
For enhancing profitability and ensuring overall business success, the proper collection and analysis of data is the key. Business Intelligence (BI) is the best tool to analyze the data and for taking data-driven decisions but it’s more important to use the right business intelligence tool which matches the requirement of your business.
You can consider multiple factors while choosing the best Business intelligence tool. Here are a few tips to choose the BI tool or system:
- Data management: Data management involves collecting, storing, organizing, protecting, verifying, and processing essential data and making it available to your organization anytime as per the requirement and need. Effective data management procedures are critical to the success of any business intelligence solution. With the continuous growth of data flowing in the digital world today, BI tools are becoming more sophisticated and can more readily model data, providing firms with a huge competitive advantage.
- Data Visualization and Dashboards: Data visualization tools present data in the form of flow charts, pie graphs, stack columns, and choropleth maps among others. You should consider the BI tool, where data can be stored in one centralized place so that data processing time can be minimized. For creating dashboards and reports it should involve less technical knowledge so that management can easily get access to the reports and dashboards.
- User-friendliness [ UI/UX]: In order for BI to be actionable for an organization, it must be accessible to non-technical users. The objective of BI is to provide the right information to the right people at the right time. With a user-friendly BI tool in place, companies can free up time for both end-users and the developers tasked with creating reports. When employees can run their own reports on-demand, it eliminates backlogs, ensures accuracy, and allows for proactive decision-making.
- Security level: Data security features should be in your BI tool checklist while considering BI tools. Your BI tool must secure your data from unauthorized use, both internally and externally. Your data can be sensitive, confidential, or even proprietary, and much of it should only be viewed and accessed by your HR or top management teams. You need the ability to customize and easily manage access to the data by departments, teams, and individuals to be in control of your data. And you need to be able to be selective about allowing access to data pools as broad as entire databases or as specific as field content.
- Total cost of ownership: If you own a car, you understand an important fact: The true costs of car ownership extend way beyond the sticker price. You’re paying for insurance, gas, maintenance, parking, car washes, accessories, etc… If you were to dive into a car purchase without calculating these “true costs”, you’d be in for a rude awakening. The same is true for Business Intelligence. Too many companies get caught up in the sticker price and ignore the “true costs” of BI. Hardware, Software, License, BI Resources, Training, Implementation, Ongoing Support & Maintenance are key contributors to TCO. It is common to mistake to make BI tool decisions purely based on User License cost alone.
There are many data analysis tools available in the market, so the decision process of selecting one is long and needs a lot of effort. BI is the brain of the organization that would enable better and faster decision-making and action. You must get it absolutely right the first time as the rework/amendments and course correction in the future is very expensive.
We offer free consultancy call that can help you make the right decision in selecting a BI tool for your business.
To book an appointment, reach out to us at sales@visiosoftsolution.com