How can you select a BI tool that meets your organization's changing needs?

??The right question here is not about tools but about architecture choices. Factors such as the resilience and platform agnosticism of your workflows, the distribution of assets and the ecosystems chosen for integration will ultimately determine your adaptability. ?? As a rule of thumb, I would say that whenever possible always favor modular open ecosystem solutions.

Compnies should use the details that ae obtained through business intelligence and data analysis to improve business decisions, identify problems or issues, spot market trends, and find new revenue or business opportunities. Visual Functionality that needs to be implemented successfully this will need IT support, Training, Customization and other factors that are needed to make this effective in the company.

When you start the right choice is never what BI tool. It’s why exactly you’re making the investment. What’s the business problem. Having a business problem in hand not only helps to get consensus on the business case but it also helps to get the definition of success criteria. Which is crucial when you’re looking to go for the next phase.

I agree that we need to define goals and requirements- what I think this section is somewhat missing the details, is the initial step, “Why?” Why do you need any tools? Defining and clearly formulating the “Why?” it will take you more than 50% into selecting the appropriate tool. The what that is clearly explained here follows the why! Having to defend “what?” can be a nightmare but if you have “why?” it will be a breeze.

Companies need to explore more about personalized gpts from chatgpt and microsoft copilot. But AI about Digital data protectiin laws should also be take into consideration.

Choose a BI tool with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. Ensure that users, both technical and non-technical, can easily navigate and derive value from the tool.

When the BI tool has a user-friendly UI, it promotes wider adoption at all skill levels and across multiple user groups within the organization. A BI tool that allows users to easily create reports, perform analysis, and give options regarding their data will be beneficial to the wider audience. It should meet the diverse needs of the organization.

Completely agree! The beauty of the data is, same data can be interpreted/analyse in many ways. Having said that, important criteria should be ease of usage and devolvement, which shall empower end users (non technical) of the report for minor/major modification of existing report as per changing business need. This in a way help business to avoid creating personal specific reports which are in long run unable to maintain and control.

Consider how fast and dependable the BI tool is in giving insights. Also check its compatibility with your cloud provider. Like for example PowerBI might not be as scalable in AWS as it will be in Microsoft Azure. Test its speed, accuracy, and consistency with different databases. How quickly does it process data and provide trustworthy recommendations? Check if the results stay consistent across different situations and users.

Pilot testing or trials can help evaluate how well the tool aligns with the organization's requirements, performance-wise before committing to a full-scale deployment. It should provide efficient processing, quick response times, and scalability to accommodate growing data volumes and user demands. Ensure the BI tool offers responsive design or dedicated mobile apps for users to access and interact with data on the go.

En mi experiencia Power BI Ofrece un excelente soporte, la mejora continua es sin lugar a dudas el valor agregado más fuerte que Microsoft Puede ofrecer con respecto a sus competidores. Hoy con Copilot incluyendo AI mejorará la forma de crear drasticamente.

A BI tool that has a wider community of users, developers, and experts will provide employees with content, tutorials, and forums. The BI tool vendors are expected to constantly innovate or bring features that align with the current trends. This will help your organization to keep up with the industry. Consider the vendor's cloud infrastructure if you are planning to shift to a specific cloud platform.

So, after countless tools, across all organizations, people, and industries, the only "right" tool is making the right data available to the right people at the right time. No tool will ever replace that. The easiest way to think about a BI tool is to compare it to a light switch, critical in some aspects but if there is no bulb, or electricity that switch is useless. Whereas if you've got the electricity the switch, and bulb are nothing more than convince. But if you've got to pick a tool, pick one that allows for governance, and security outside the tool, and supports excel integration natively. The reason, there is NO one size fits all, and everyone LOVES excel. Don't fight it, build to extend to it, and show the power away from it.

The BI tool depends on the rest of the company tech stack. Choose the tool that is most compatible to your data sources like ERPs, CRMs and PMOs. It is also better to choose the most common ones so that turnover does not affect BI processes too much.

The answer lies not in one single product name but rather the business need as well as the tech stack of your organisation. Where one tool might be the best for org A , it might be a complete nonsense of org B. After carefully evaluating the tech stack I would recommend to check how deeply routed is this product to providing the business need (like processes etc.). Also worth noting is how futuristic the product is especially in allowing connectivity to open ecosystem. In a dynamic environment like today its also worth checking for vendor lock in because our tech stacks evolve over couple of years and your choice should not limit your capabilities and decisions in future.

Market research for tools: Different tools provide different capabilities. It’s necessary to match client requirements with the capabilities the tool can offer.

I think before asking about the tools. We need to define the organization's needs and its goal. Also, the size of the data and it's growing. The budget is set for the bi team also, security level in the organization.

Selecting a Business Intelligence (BI) tool for your organization is a critical decision and needs to be aligned to the organizations’ BI strategy. It should involve considering several key criteria such as data connectivity to various sources, user-friendliness for non-technical users, scalability to handle data growth, robust reporting and visualization capabilities, support for real-time analytics, data security features, integration capabilities with existing systems, and overall cost of ownership. Additionally, evaluating vendor reputation, user support, and the tool's ability to adapt to evolving business needs are crucial aspects in making an informed decision.

One big question was how integrable the tools. Some tools could not have the chance to share data easily, and that will require to build API or other resources. If you are not prepare that will cost you more than the expected.