How to Choose the Right BI Platform for Your Organization

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Choosing a business intelligence platform needs to be wisely done because of the sheer amount of time, effort, and money involved with it. The exponential increase in data-driven adoptions through modern platforms calls for higher expectations on BI platforms. With every player offering nearly the same features, business intelligence tools are almost indistinguishable making it tough for purchasers to compare and assess correctly.

Assess the Need for BI Platform

Organizations need to determine why they need a BI platform. Is it because they want their internal users to make an informed decision? Is increasing coordination between teams the main intention? Are you looking to harness real-time insights to improve organizational strategy along with advanced analytics?

Knowing why you want a business intelligence platform or business intelligence software forms the foundation for choosing the right one. A business intelligence platform needs to cater to the organization’s specific requirements and also the needs of each department or business unit.

The right business intelligence platform does more than give you insights that are data-driven, they also improve your BI strategy and data intelligence plan by keeping data clean, easier to access, analyze, and adapt to changing business environments.

Factors to consider when choosing a BI platform for your Organization

This is a checklist of the top features or capabilities one must keep in mind to choose a business intelligence platform or business intelligence software for your organization.

Ease of Use

A business intelligence tool needs to cater to different sets of users such as analysts, developers, business users, or specific teams. The tool needs to be able to interpret data to get the results they need for their specific segment. A complex business intelligence tool will expect the user to be tech-savvy. However, a Business Intelligence software that is easy to use empowers any user by offering an adaptive experience. This will improve user experience and customize the process for the user. Every user needs to experience their own ‘aha moment with the product and bring their specific stories to life. An easy to use platform will give any user control over the BI process and allow them to harness technology to scale effectively.

Advanced analytics

The amount of data generated in an organization is increasing day by day. Hence, a BI tool needs to be equipped with capabilities to manage every step involved in a data analytics journey without fail. Solutions like Data Universe, offered by Lumenore, helps businesses ramp up their time to insight by building an end-to-end data engineering solution. Other prominent advanced analytics capabilities like natural language querying, predictive intelligence, reporting, multi page reports, sentiment analysis, and automatic descriptions of answers are also key factors that will help organizations in their data intelligence journey. Business intelligence tools also need to offer automated insights, advanced analytics, and cataloging to improve the quality of decision making.

Dynamic Dashboards

According to a survey, the top three business intelligence trends that most companies swear by are data visualization, data quality management, and self-service business intelligence (BI).Visual analytics plays an important role in offering intuitive insights. The business intelligence platform you choose needs to enable you to share and view through dynamic dashboards. Users can get reports, graphs, charts, and modules updated in real-time and share/ publish the results in internal platforms. Self-service capabilities also help every user access data, create their own visualizations and charts, and customize the usage.

End-to-end Data Lifecycle Management

The best business intelligence platforms are a waste if they cannot connect to your data and optimize it. To propel your BI strategy, it is important to have the right data architecture process and faster data mining capabilities. Your platform should be able to automatically access data and generate reports.

The right tool will help manage data life cycles – from ingestion and engineering to storage and advanced analytics to visual insights. You should also be able to choose how you want to deploy your analytics and allow you to integrate seamlessly without any silos. The entire data pipeline needs to be integrated and the ETL/ELT procedures need to be adhered to. The core repository of data needs to be accessible, unified, and secure.

Customized Solutions

With data at the center of everyday work, all roles in a company can deliver on time and improve their performance. IT teams can manage data, make it accessible, and control how data is leveraged. Marketing teams can track, view, and notice scope for improvement in the journey to improve marketing ROI. Sales teams can improve sales forecasting accuracy, notice where users are stuck in the sales journey, and optimize coverage and revenues. Customer Success teams can predict churn, get customer insights, notice chances for upsell or cross-sell, and hyper-personalize. The BI tool also needs to integrate with other teams to complement the data-driven decision making process. It needs to match your organization’s scale and preferred abilities.

Conduct a full comparison

Many organizations offer customizable tools and ad hoc reporting needs. But, there are multiple hidden costs. Even if the product is ‘free’, consider all the features you need that meet your organization grade requirements. A premium BI platform will help you customise the platform for your organization’s specific needs. They also offer flexibility and the capability to scale as your company grows. There is also increased support, cloud infrastructure, and more resources to deal with any issues.

Bottom Line: Make the right choice

Keep your organization’s goals and priorities in mind while you evaluate a business intelligence platform. Choose a provider who empowers every business unit regardless of skill levels. Ensure that the platform can scale as the organization grows and expands. The right business intelligence platform needs to adapt to changing company needs and ensure the KPIs are met.

If you still need assistance, please feel free to connect with a BI expert today!