The global business intelligence market crossed $20 billion in value last year. Statista predicts the industry’s cloud computing and big data analytics segments to accelerate the compound annual growth rate beyond its current 7.6 percent. Many businesses rely on in-depth insights from BI systems to enhance business performance and streamlined services. In recent years, there has been an explosion of business intelligence platform options on the market. This article delves into the features businesses can consider in choosing a business platform.
Table of Contents
Open Integration
Today’s organizations want timely access to their data for enhanced decision-making. But there’s a challenge: Business operations result in mountains of data sourced from various departments, creating data silos. Businesses need a long time to sift through various data sources to obtain valuable insights relevant to their data teams. Data silos can also lead to duplicates in business results, apart from the time lags. For instance, a data team using manual processes may record one product twice or contact a customer multiple times.
The best business intelligence platforms favor end-to-end integration, making it easier for BI professionals to connect data from disparate sources, creating a single source of truth. With open integration, businesses can access their data and leverage essential data from social media, websites, and other platforms. Choosing an integration-friendly business intelligence tool or Business Intelligence Platform allows you to integrate as many applications as possible, seamlessly combining the information into an actionable report.
Geospatial Mapping
The modern business world thrives on consistent operations incorporating business continuity strategies to achieve operational efficiency. This productivity level requires that BI professionals harness real-time insights to identify weaknesses and deploy solutions with no downtime. Therefore, choosing BI systems that help your business identify slow-performing areas with real-time metrics can be a good idea. Several BI application solutions use visual analytics to transform your information into cartographic representations, which are easier to interpret than geographical data.
The beautiful visualizations tell you more about your business operations at a glance. For many people, the ease of use that comes with a BI platform’s user interface is a significant factor in making the final decision.
Executive Dashboards
About 90 percent of businesses opt for custom dashboards as a key feature they consider in choosing a business intelligence software. Several dashboard templates exist for businesses to make sense of market trends and advanced analytics. However, creating your own dashboard increases your data collection and analytical capability to make better decisions. Businesses using customizable dashboards encounter fewer data discovery and data analytics limitations. You can filter large data sets and focus on tailored metrics for agile and smarter decisions. Ultimately, executive dashboards make it easier to render real-time data in multiple forms, including graphs, charts, and information reports.
User-Specific Security
Business intelligence solutions focus on an organization’s unique business needs. For this reason, personalization is a top priority for business leaders. User-specific security involves strategies to consider your BI systems’ security based on an individual’s unique situation. Choosing BI systems that allow you to personalize features and applications for specific groups can be a good idea. The good news is that many BI platforms run on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. SaaS deployment makes it easier to meet large and small business needs concurrently.
Interactive Reports
Interactive data visualization takes business interaction with data to the next level. Interactive visualization deployment doesn’t only give businesses easy access to real-time data but also makes it easier for businesses to understand the data they generate for better business decisions. Businesses can use time-series zooming to scan large data sets and detect anomalies.
All in all, the future of BI and data management holds significant promise for businesses of all sizes to use automation in facilitating complex tasks. Businesses can increasingly leverage data for significant agility and competitive advantage perks. Choosing a BI platform that affords you all the features to solve your current problems and identify future trends for growth can be a great option.
Assemble Data
As indicated by IDG, organizations utilize a normal of 400 information sources across their association to take care of their BI capacities. BI stages should assemble information from those sources into one spot to comprehend and imagine what’s going on.
While assessing BI stages, search for the capacity to do the accompanying:
Coordinate numerous information sources. BI stages ought to coordinate numerous information bases (/item/information sources/), information distribution centers, and CSV records. This is the way that examines Chartio:
Clean information and oversee information quality. As per BI-Survey.com, information quality administration (DQ the board) best the rundown of BI patterns acquiring significance. Different informational indexes should be made usable and understandable, and BI stages should assist with keeping up with that quality and accelerate the most common way of cleaning low quality information.
Mix information. Imported and cleaned information is fit to be mixed together into one working informational collection. BI stages should make is easy to mix information and gain a total view across the entirety of your information sources.
Guarantee consistence and security. BI stages should assist you with dealing with your information in a solid and consistent manner. For example, assuming you’re like Carelinx, who utilizes individual wellbeing data to coordinate their clients with guardians, you really want a HIPAA-agreeable BI stage.
Get Data
With piles of information channeled into and available from one spot, you can begin to get what everything implies. A BI stage will enable you to figure out, coordinate, and inquiry your information.
While assessing BI stages, search for the capacity to do the accompanying:
Model and coordinate information. With each of your information incorporated, you want a productive method for getting sorted out it into connections that work for your business. For example, you can utilize highlights like information stores, which can be considered modified and organized little data sets, to tackle the particular necessities of your showcasing group.
Inquiry information. Each client of the BI stage ought to have a simple approach to questioning the information to find the solutions they need rapidly. For instance, here’s somebody utilizing Visual SQL to question information with no coding:
