Business intelligence software is a set of tools used by companies to retrieve, analyze, and transform data into meaningful information. Examples of business intelligence tools include data visualization, data warehousing, dashboards, and reporting.
Dashboards: Executive dashboards give your organization’s leaders a real-time overview of your business in the form of graphs, charts, summaries and other information reports.
Reports: Ranking reports let you easily view the best- and worst-performing facets of your business while Interactive reports allow users to condense the massive amounts of collected data into a wide variety of possible views.
Integration: Sometimes, information not only is needed from internal sales but also from other websites, emails and social media etc. BI integrates all the platforms on a single interface so it is easier to access data through various platforms.
Authorization: Your BI tool also allows you to restrict certain users from not authorizing your company data sets you don’t want them to access.
Strategy: BI initiatives require a significant investment and are typically launched to address specific needs or fill existing gaps. While those overarching goals may be apparent to all stakeholders, a loose definition of tactics for how to accomplish these goals can lead to diminished results, lack of collaboration and tension across departments.
Metrics: Choosing metrics that provide the needed insight to drive new routes of decision-making can be tricky. It can be particularly challenging to get department leaders and/or upper management to agree on them, but it is critical to choose those that support fact-based decision-making.
Data Integrity: The accuracy of your company data determines the value received from your BI solution. Unfortunately, it is difficult for many companies to ensure clean, current and consistent data is getting pulled from various business systems across the company.
ROI: ROI is one of the most telling metrics to the success of your project. As noted above, there are many variables that affect the results of a BI project. Lack of clarity or focus can derail your success and lead to results that don’t measure up to expectations.
Small and Medium Businesses: Your small or medium sized business needs features like, effective dashboards but for them to be useful, you also need good KPIs. Your BI Software must contain answers for Ad Hoc queries whenever you need to ask.
Large Businesses: You large business also requires similar type of features you will use for small businesses but the only difference is the data and business size that your BI software must work for.
The average cost of business intelligence software is $3000 per year, but it is still varied based on the features you require or size of your business.