Business Intelligence Software Buyer’s Guide

What is Business Intelligence Software?

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.

Why is it necessary to deploy a Business Intelligence Software in your company?
  • A company needs to translate data into information in order to plan future business strategies. Business Intelligence Software helps you achieve that.
  • It also helps you understand the descriptive and predictive analytics of your company.
  • Business Intelligence Software always is quick in making decisions in an easier way. This is helpful when there are urgent issues at hand.
  • BI Software can also keep track on all the organization processes so you can closely observe all the tasks going on in your company.
  • Information sharing is made easier and effective through Business Intelligence
What are the important features of Business Intelligence Software?

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.

What to look for in ideal BI Software?
  • Ability to integrate with the current system.
  • Clearly establish the criteria in business terms.
  • Ensure the interface is easy to use and intuitive.
  • Take part in data drilling and data filtering tasks.
  • Provide a sufficient level of security.
  • Think about local intelligence.
  • Keep an eye on the ranking reports.
What are the potential issues in BI Software?

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.

How does BI Software affect SME’s and Large Businesses?

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.

What is the pricing of BI Software?

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.