In this day and age when businesses cannot anymore do away with technology because of the necessity of competition, business intelligence tools are necessary in order to analyze data and present useful information for a business. This should be done in order to help business managers as well as corporate executives make better and more informed decisions as well as establish more efficient strategies in order to reach their goals. In order to achieve it, the importance of choosing top business intelligence software cannot be emphasized too heavily.
Business intelligence software includes all the tools, methodologies and applications that make possible the collection of data from internal and external sources for a particular business organization. With good business intelligence software for your business, your business can benefit from accelerated and improved decision making processes, optimization of internal business operations, and increase in operational efficiency. This is all for the purpose of increasing revenue, identifying current market trends, make the business become at par with its rivals, and spot business problems that need immediate attention.
A long time ago, business intelligence tools were used only by data analysts and IT professionals who would conduct analysis on a business and would produce reports regarding these analyses. The reports would also have query results for business owners. However, there have been more and more business executives and workers who have learned how to use business intelligence software by themselves. However, if you do not know which BI tools or software to choose, then you will either be wasting a whole lot of money or you will simply be endangering your business.
Business intelligence software reviews will always give you these five qualities of good business intelligence tools that you should consider when choosing them:
Easy to Use
Any business intelligence software needs an intuitive design in order for it to be used easily by anyone in the business organization who is tasked to deal with it. Modern business intelligence solutions should be just as easy to use as your smartphone. If it is anything more difficult than that then that will most likely and unnecessarily take up quality time. With easy-to-use business intelligence tools, what once used to take many months or even years to implement can now take only a few weeks or even days.
The SaaS software did well to contribute to this sudden dramatic increase in modernization. With SaaS software, there is no need for the purchase and maintenance of hardware and the installation and licensing of software. Through SaaS software, business intelligence tools can be run directly from the Internet.
Good business intelligence software must not only have intuitive designs or easy-to-use systems and processes but also user-friendly interfaces. In technological parlance, “user-friendly” means the same as fast and reliable as well as timely. This is for the purpose of providing information at exactly the right time that it is needed and it should be acted upon.
Moreover, business intelligence tools must be readily available on almost all types of devices, such as smartphones and tablets considering the fact that these gadgets are currently the popular ones. Furthermore, the ideal business intelligence software must be able to save your searches in order for easy future access to the same selections. Thus, it makes things much easier when you opt for easy-to-use business intelligence tools.
Relevant to Industry
It does not make sense at all if you still have to ask for business advice from people who are obviously outside your industry. However, in the past when there were no reliable business intelligence tools yet, you must have used to do that. However, nowadays, when you want to ask about business aspects that require particular specialized domain knowledge or expertise, then you can just go for the best business intelligence software.
Good reviews of business intelligence software will tell you that any good business intelligence tools will ensure that your data is properly analyzed in such a way that is relevant to your business. This is the domain expertise feature of good business intelligence software, and will ensure that every analysis has a bearing to your industry. The point is that you should always look for tools that have industry-specific analysis and insights.
There is so much misunderstanding and the possibility of making a mistake if business advice is taken from people from outside your industry or business. If you do this and you indeed make a mistake, then you have no one to blame but yourself for not getting a business intelligence software that is actually suited for your line of business.
Integrated Data Sources
If your business data is coming from various different sources, then it will be difficult for you to get the whole picture. In fact, based on information from KPMG, a popular professional service company that introduces technology services and features to many businesses, more than half, or specifically 55%, of all organizations are facing problems and difficulties when it comes to decision making processes involving data analysis from different sources.
Thus, the solution is a good business intelligence software for your business. Modern business intelligence solutions can solve the problem of multiple data sources by providing insights from separate databases using an integrated dashboard that includes data extracted from Excel spreadsheets. Just always make sure that you are choosing one good business intelligence software that will be able to crunch your relevant data completely and not just bits of it.
Every good business intelligence tool will make the process of embedding data or charts coming from other applications. A good business intelligence tool can actually seamlessly extract all the necessary data for analysis and pull them into one business intelligence application. This also implies that modern business intelligence software must be able to support any database or platform in the first place. As there are more and more new databases, database support increases in importance. That is why even if your company uses only one database at the moment, getting a good BI software that has a broad database support will be a good preparation for future expansion.
Visual Graphics
Sometimes good BI tools will give you the best analysis by getting all date in just one place, but its more important use is to help you get the right insights out of the right data. Good business intelligence solutions for your business have always made use of visual graphics for many decades. However, a good business intelligence software can actually transform data into a visual representation that is considered actionable.
In order to know if a BI software can handle this function well is to write down the actual questions that you have in mind about the business and check if the BI tool can actually represent the answer visually. If the resulting graph cannot provide you with the answer that you need, then you have to choose a different BI software.
The use of interactive graphs can actually ensure that the business intelligence software is not only easy to use but something that can provide actionable insights to the user. In fact, with a good BI software for your business, you can just click on any part of the graph for a more elaborate explanation of the information or for more information on a particular aspect of business demonstrated by the graph. Good BI tools also provide graphs that consequently change when one or more filters are selected or when parameters are modified.
Reasonable Cost
Business intelligence software was once only a privilege of large companies and corporations. Small companies could not afford good BI tools because of their expensiveness of implementation. However, fortunately, due to innovations in data storage, IT costs have dramatically decreased. One of the best factors that brought about this change was cloud computing, which significantly caused reduction in the time and fees associated with implementation.
In fact, you don’t need to spend large amounts of money on your business intelligence software. What you need is just to check the data on Total Cost of Ownership, or TCO, which includes details on the actually on-going maintenance costs as well as implementation costs. If what you have is a BI tool that has high startup costs as well as long lead times, then probably it is not a modern business intelligence solution for your business.
You will simply get into trouble if are not particular with the type of business intelligence software that you should purchase for your business. A good business intelligence tool is not only one that is easy and efficient to use but also one that has every bit of relevance to your business and industry. It should also use data that comes from unified sources. It should not only be able to present data visually but should also be able to give actionable strategies and suggestions in visual form. It should be reasonably priced too. If you do not choose the best intelligence software for your business, then you will be in for some trouble later on and you will not be able to gain the maximum profit from your business.
Check out CrowdReviews.com on the latest reviews of business intelligence software for all your business needs.
Jeev Trika
Latest posts by Jeev Trika (see all)
- 5 Reasons to Use Compliance Software for Business Management - November 25, 2016
- How to Find Reliable Reviews of Video Conferencing Software - November 24, 2016
- Why You Must Read Best Business Intelligence Software Reviews - November 23, 2016