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There is no shortage of enterprise intelligence in the market. It is observed that companies who made intelligent use of their data experienced better growth as compared to those who didn’t. There are ample amounts of business intelligence tools in the market which makes it vital for businesses to filter out the options and choose the ones that best suit their requirements. Asking the right questions before making an investment in the business intelligence dashboard will go a long way in ensuring that companies receive maximum value out of the software.
1. What do you have for data and what do you want to analyze?
Without a genuine understanding of both these questions, you cannot expect a business analytics dashboard to run smoothly. Performing data profiling is a good idea before implementation. Is your data structured or unstructured? What are your primary data sources? Do you collect your data from the warehouse or get real-time data from social media channels and customer engagement? There are 10 top sources of big data. Figuring out what type of data you work with is essential before choosing the right business intelligence platform for it.
2. Will this software enable your business to make critical decisions?
The best software is only as good as the people who use it. There are a lot of ways to collect data, with so much data to consider, it sometimes becomes difficult to segregate the valuable data from the junk. Business intelligence dashboard software is a great way to manage the problem and it has machine learning capabilities to source, review, and clean data. This allows the companies to spend more time considering critical decisions.
3. Who are your analytics users going to be? Will they be technical people?
The last few decades have brought a drastic change in the way businesses function. Some of the leading software as service players have empowered non-technical users to use a wide range of reporting tools. Many BI tools in the market offer various user-friendly features making them accessible for everyone to create reports, queries, and analytics on their own without the help of the IT team.
4. Do you just want the dashboard or the whole BI?
Many business intelligence solutions are now providing full BI platforms including data integration, database storage, data modelling to mobile application development tools. The value of a fully integrated platform that replaces all these individual tools may be well worth evaluating during the buying cycle. Depending on what services you need, you can choose the appropriate business analytics dashboard for your business.
5. Will this investment maximize your employee productivity?
Everyone in the company can maximize their productivity if they have the access to the same set of tools and pieces of equipment. The teams need dashboards and programs that operate across all devices and integrate with other commonly used tools. A cloud-based business intelligence tool is the best choice for most businesses as they offer significant advantages. With cloud-based BI tools, the data sets and models can be stored on the cloud where every member of the team can view and access them. Moreover, they also offer machine learning and predictive analytics that can automate the reporting process and routine tasks so it frees up more time for creative and strategic planning.
