The following five tips are not an exhaustive list, but provide a framework for BI tool evaluation and selection at your business:
1. Make sure the tool works with your data:
Does the tool you’re evaluating lend itself to working with different types of data (including structured and unstructured data), or does it work well only with financial data that can be loaded into a cube for “slicing and dicing”? You will need a tool that provides enough flexibility to work with the types of data you want to load and analyze, so this is an important consideration.
2. Pick a business intelligence tool that fits with resources and skills:
Does your organization already have an IT group that can define the metadata, perform complex data integrations, and build reports/dashboards? If not, you may need a new department or center of excellence to build and manage the BI tool. You will need the right people, who have the right skills, to actually get value from your BI tool.
3. Choose a BI tool that provides the right business capabilities:
What types of visualizations do you need, and how can the business integrate additional data sources (e.g., spreadsheets) with the BI tool you choose? Make sure you have answers to those questions before you invest in any business intelligence technology to make sure you get a tool that can give you what you need.
4. Technical capabilities (e.g. architecture and design):
Does the organization have a reporting database, data warehouse or data mart? Consider whether your tool will need to connect to and integrate with multiple data sources. Also, think about whether your business have certain performance needs that require an in-memory data engine, instead of the underlying databases, to store the data.
5. Decide where your BI software will be located – either on-premises or in the cloud:
Check whether your organization has IT support to manage both the hardware and software. Is it ready for a cloud-based business intelligence solution and understand the risks?