6 Signs Your Enterprise BI Software Is Below Par
What makes a BI solution enterprise-ready? Or, by the same token, what warning signs tell you immediately that your BI won’t cope with the complex needs of a large and rapidly growing organization — and should send you fleeing for the hills?
The offerings of BI solutions for enterprises vary wildly, but whether you’re using an on-premise version or an enterprise BI cloud solution, there are some common factors you absolutely must watch out for.
Ready to learn more? Let’s dive in.
Let’s start with the industry’s preeminent authority on the matter: Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.
To figure out how well equipped for the task each enterprise BI platform is, Gartner looks at how well it performs in the following areas: key use cases, infrastructure, data management, data analysis and content creation, how findings are shared, and overall product capabilities.
The most important questions to ask here are:
It’s essential that any enterprise-grade BI solution has a robust system in place for user administration and security, as well the underlying architecture to audit access, optimize performance, and ensure high availability and disaster recovery.
What’s more, it should be capable of connecting to and ingesting all kinds of structured and unstructured data sources and working with all kinds of data storage systems, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Users should be able to make use of a common SOR semantic model and manage metadata easily — including tools for searching, capturing, storing, reusing, and publishing metadata objects like Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics, dimensions, hierarchies, measures, report layout objects, and parameters. Admins should be able to mash up their data and metadata however they want to draw out the insights they need.
Next up, enterprise business intelligence software should really come with built-in capabilities for self-contained data storage and ETL functions, allowing you to index and refresh your data quickly and easily, too.
The biggest issue here, though, is the ability to prepare your data for analysis without having to run to IT at every step. Intuitive, genuinely self-service data preparation tools are crucial, especially when it comes to combining disparate data sources and building your own analytic models and reports.
How engaging and well-connected is the front end of your BI solution? To make the grade, enterprise BI should allow you to build your own interactive dashboards, use advanced, embedded analytics to manipulate data however you want — and access it from anywhere, including mobile devices.
The visuals on offer should also go way beyond simple pie and bar charts — you should be able to create beautiful, interactive tree, heat and geographic maps, scatter plots, and so on, too. Ideally, you’ll even be able to make use of smart data discovery tools and innovative tools like natural language processing to engage with the results as seamlessly as possible.
