A Business Intelligence and reporting tool must provide valuable management information to support business operations, the information must be relevant, current and accurate, and the tool must be easy to use and accessible. Logical. In the wide range of BI & reporting tools, almost every known solution meets these requirements. A few other things you may not think of as quickly, but they are very important to pay attention to when choosing a BI tool:
1. Think carefully in advance about what information is important to you
This seems like an open door, but it is a step that is often skipped. Even in some large organizations, there is a notion that the BI tool should solve all problems out of the blue. But it's not that simple. You yourself must have a vision of what information is important for successfully managing the organization. What are you steering for? What KPIs are crucial? What periodic reports do you need? Who needs what information and when? All questions you have to answer yourself.
2. Make sure you have the back-end taken care of.
Everything hinges on structure. To make good use of your BI tool, the data must be in order. Make sure that you have a grip on your data warehouses and that you can structure the extensive 'spaghetti' of information into so-called data cubes. This gives you the opportunity to use almost any front-end BI-tool to present the most beautiful and valuable KPIs. Moreover, this allows you to grow along with developments; the developments in the world of BI follow each other rapidly and with the back-end in order you have the flexibility to always connect the best front-end BI-tool to it.
3. Choose a solution that collects all business information centrally
Business information is stored in multiple places, in multiple systems, on paper and in the minds of employees. A Business Intelligence solution becomes truly valuable only when it collects ALL business information centrally. Therefore, make sure that all important data is digitized and that the BI tool processes data from all different information sources.
4. Choose a tool that not only works for you now, but also in the future
When choosing a BI & reporting tool, you quickly tend to focus only on the present; what is the best solution right now? But it is important to consider the future. Will the platform you choose continue to be supported in the future? Will the vendor/partner helping you still exist in 5 or 10 years? And how will changes in legislation, your industry or your business affect BI needs? Tough questions to answer, but consider these factors whenever possible.
5. Choose simplicity and ease of use over design and features
More features is not necessarily better. When the possibilities are endless, you run the risk of end users perceiving the solution as too complex and cluttered. And the goal is precisely to work with an accessible and user-friendly system. Design should also not be the top priority. While it is nice to work with a beautifully designed system, this is obviously not what ultimately provides value for your organization.
Make the choice of a BI tool especially SINGLE. These tips do show that you need to gather opinions from IT specialists, management, administration and end users before making a choice.
Bjorn Schouten is a Business Intelligence Consultant at Dysel and helps clients turn data into valuable management information.
