Choosing a Business Intelligence System – The Basics
The decision-making in your business impacts future productivity, therefore, BI implementation should be considered to boost company potential. BI can be useful for supporting many areas of a business, such as the decision-making for staff and departments. Choosing a Business Intelligence system can be overwhelming – even a simple internet search will return more than 30 different types of software. Determining the needs of your business first and integrating this into your search are needed to make an informed decision Budget
Primarily, you should decide how much money you can spend on BI implementation. Since BI systems are tied to business growth, BI is an investment that starts at $20,000 or more. Investing money in this range will offer positive ongoing results; however, if your business has not yet taken off, there are some Business Intelligence systems available from $2,000. Of course, the less money you invest, the less data and users the system will be able to handle, so you should select a budget based on business size.
Data
The purpose of BI implementation is for managers to access data when they need to, therefore you must pay thought to your data. Is your data hosted through a cloud service or is it in-house? Future assessments, predictions and models can be achieved when data is linked into a BI system, so you need to locate a vendor mature enough to meet your needs. For data to be accessible, current and easy to export as documents or presentations, you must discover how much data you have and where it derives from, such as from CSV files, Excel Sheets or SQL Servers.
System Details
By knowing your budget and data needs you can focus on the BI system details, so that reporting can be automated and spread out to the entire population of users. To find a suitable BI implementation system, you must know how many users will be using the system and whether or not they will use mobile devices to access it. In addition to this, you should think about your current software, your infrastructure requirements, reporting requirements and the type of analysis you want.
Understanding your requirements for BI implementation will prevent you from spending too much money on systems that are missing key features. Prior to downloading software, go through a checklist of attributes so that interdepartmental information can be accessed in an accurate pictorial format.