THIS Makes the BEST Business Intelligence Solution

Having spent most of my professional career in the business intelligence and analytics space, I am qualified to share my honest opinion of what constitutes a good business intelligence solution.

We live in a world where competition is fierce, all from the likes of various providers such as Microsoft, Qlik, Tableau (Salesforce) and much much more. I’ve spent a good share of time exploring each product.

Here’s my take on what makes a good business intelligence solution:

Seamless Data Ingestion

The ability to load data without any hiccups during the connection process, or during the automated, recurring data refresh cycles would be a god-send. BI Platforms sometimes use their own proprietary logic to transform queries and execution plans. This results in time-out or other conflict errors occasionally.

Development Scalability

I can’t stress enough the number of times I’ve made something nice and fancy that worked well when it comes to visualizations (such as a tile-view KPI), and had to replicate it. I cane to find out that there is absolutely no way of copying and pasting the component/widget. Some BI solutions require you to rebuild them from scratch. Thankfully, some do allow you the ability to copy and paste them for scalability and simply replace the values with the additional measures you’d like to add.

Report Distribution

Report Distribution is definitely a requirement for a business intelligence solution to be effective. Business users and leadership want to be able to monitor the business without having to jump through hoops. What better way to accomplish this than having periodic reports sent to their email inbox?

This, alone, does not satisfy the requirement however. In a perfect world, the dashboard/report should render exactly how the dashboard was developed or would look, should one choose to visit it themselves. The report should be a well-rendered body image that is not distorted, and additionally be attached as a file – such as a pdf – so that it is downloadable and printable.

An additional nice to have, since I’ve come across just about every business requirement you can think of, is being able to send the report distributions dynamically. That is, being able to send or not send the report only if a certain criteria is met – such as if the data is successfully refreshed as designed, or if the data presented is of significance to the itemized, respective recipient(s).

Self-service analytics

We all preach how self-serve BI tools are a given with all platforms. However, this is simply not true. There is a lot that should go into what constitutes self-service analytics.

As a first, the data and fields need to be simple and cohesive to the audience, and the audience needs to be competent enough to be able to navigate the BI platform with minimal training. A well-designed product is one that doesn’t require much training. The BI platform for self-service use should be straight forward and simple to use. Additionally, it is incumbent on developers to ensure all reporting and dashboards in the organization follow the same design language and principals, setting an organizational standard.

While keeping simplicity in mind, the platform also needs to be feature-rich. Different audiences and users have varying preferences as to how they wish to analyze information – whether it be through tables, excel sheets, or visualizations. A good BI tool must offer the ability to consume information through any of these views, as per the user’s preference. Additionally, a very effective nice-to-have would be enabling a dynamic hierarchy drill-down for the end-user to use. Want to see sales numbers by product by region? Sure. Want to mix it up and see sales numbers by region, THEN by product? You got it, just drag and drop the dimensions as you wish.

Ultimately, there is no single perfect Business Intelligence tool out there. I can confirm this as I’ve used most of them and when one feature works well, another falls short for each one. However, my qualified opinion through many years of working in this space is that the above mentioned features should be the foundation of what makes you select the best business intelligence solution for your organization.