There are many offerings that fall under the banner of Business intelligence software, and so it can be confusing for a company to determine which particular Business Intelligence software will best meet their needs, whether that solution is a traditional, on-premise one or a SaaS BI solution.
Here are some questions to ask in evaluating a BI solution:
Back-end process automation- Does the solution automate much of the back-end processes (ETL , OLAP , and The Data Warehouse) to reduce time-to-insight, costs and resource drain?
Data Upload and Integration
- From which types of data sources can you analyze information: flat files, Excel documents, SQL databases, operational application data from CRM and web analytic solutions, etc?
- Are there connectors to popular business applications - such as salesforce.com and Google Analytics – that make it easier to connect to data sources and control which types of data get included in analysis?
- How easy is it to connect the SaaS or on-demand solution with your data sources? How easy is it to combine data from multiple sources together?
Usability and manageability
- Is the BI solution a fully integrated BI solution or a patchwork quilt of legacy and newer solutions?
- How much configuration does the system require to publish complete, accurate, and current reports?
- Is the overall interface intuitive and easily usable – with training – by non-technical members of the business team? A well-designed BI solution will provide left brain understanding to right brained users.
- Can you control with whom you share your information and what they can see?
- Once you've uploaded data, does the system automatically generate some reports to get you started?
- Can you invite your colleagues to have access to your most recent reports whenever they want; can they monitor data trends over time without having to locate old emailed reports?
Reporting and Dashboards
- Does the solution offer a full range of analysis and reporting such as: operational reporting/banded reporting, dashboards, OLAP/slice-dice/pivot, and alerts?
- How customizable are reports and are there report templates to help you get started?
- How easily can dashboards be customized? If so, do the dashboards display at-a-glance the information you need to track?
- How actionable is the data? Another way to look at this is – Is the analysis easily understandable and do you readily understand what action you need to take based on the findings?
Data and Application Security
- Are the applications providing access to your data secure? Make sure they are designed from the ground up to protect the security of your information.
Please download the Birst Security Whitepaper for more help in judging the security of vendors, your data, and application solutions.
Continue to the Criteria to Use in Evaluating Busniess Intelligence Vendors
