The BI Pentagon of Success: The importance of Business Process in the Selection of BI Tools

The goal of any valuable business tool is not to view problems encountered as a hindrance but to utilise these to generate growth. In the modern technological world, there are numerous BI tools (solo or in combination) and automation approaches that are available at the disposal of business leaders. Matching a business problem with the correct tool (and their subsequent deliverable) is key to success in order the reap the full benefit of any BI solution. Whilst end-user interaction with a business intelligence tools is a highly subjective matter, diverse BI tools bring different strengths to fore influencing the overall output of a solution.

The adoption of the BI Pentagon of Success model endeavours to make a BI implementation into a simpler, faster and a leaner process. Whilst a vendor or implementation partner may give the impressions that their recommended BI tools is capable of everything, the reality is that one tool may be stronger in one function whilst other may have an edge in other. It is seldom that a singular tool can deliver all best practices or meet all requirements when it comes to BI. Ensuring that success of an implementation enables the cost incurred in acquiring and implementing BI tool gets recovered in the longer run.

Broadly Embraced Tools

A.   Reporting Tool

In recent years, the report writing tool has not been perceived as such an attractive notion when it comes to quantifying BI business benefits. However, it still retains its importance in the realm of specialist report writing, required for complex layouts or to create precise to look and feel. Intelligent report writing is vital to a BI solution in order to manage complex layouts, reliable presentations, pagination, report scheduling, flawless pixel rendering for fine printing and to handle diverse export formats. Simultaneously, the selected reporting tool should ideally become integrated with other enterprise applications. The tool should be able to replicate the old reports/spreadsheet formats in a new environment with ease in order to enable a smooth transition between tools from a user perspective.

The BI Pentagon Pentagon of Success prompts stakeholders to keep a tight focus on reports that supports effective decision making. The misuse of tools such as a report writer could negatively impact the output and quality of a BI solution.

B.   Ad-hoc Query Tool

The Ad-hoc Query Tool available in a BI solution always adequate attention due to the limited tuning and configuration required, leading to enormous usability and flexibility in deep data exploration. It empowers end users to play with data and is an easily visible business benefit of a BI solution; for these reasons alone it is easy to understand why it draws the attention of power users. It also allows the user to dynamically modify and drill through the reports for powerful data analysis. The flexibility of this tool frees up the valuable IT resources engaged in the BI implementation and facilitates end users to have self-service information. Evidently, ad-hoc query ability is a truly great selling point for any BI tool due to this apparent ease of deployment and usage to many semi-skilled operators.

The BI Pentagon of Success has an extensive strategy that lays down guidelines as to how and where ah-hoc queries should be used, promoting a sense of structured and ensuring that it is not incorrectly forced into all types of business data analysis.

C.   Spreadsheets

In this era, no business could possibly be imagine existing without the use of spreadsheets. Just about every BI tool in the market claims to support spreadsheet integration. Subsequently, it is not surprising that users will often judge the power of a BI tool by analogy to spreadsheet applications. Due to the worldwide acceptance of Microsoft Excel (with advanced features on Data Analytics), providing tight and seamless integration between Excel and a BI solution has become compulsory.

The BI Pentagon of Success advocates the usage of BI tools which tightly integrate with a spreadsheet of all types (online or offline depending on the business requirements). So that, out of familiarity, users are able to quickly automate essential reports and do basic data analysis on a self-service basis. At the same time, the BI Pentagon model also backs the use of original features of BI wherever possible, rather than continuously porting data to optimise the use of the BI solution.

D.   Dashboards / Scorecards

 Simply speaking, Scorecards and Dashboards translate the BI implementation strategy into accountability through visualisation and measures. Over the years, business dashboards have evolved due to the fact that they can now displays real-time data and that tactical information is often displayed in the form of multi-dimensional graphs and charts. They offer seamless agility to drill down from executive summaries to secondary data. As dashboards evolved, they have become an increasingly useful platform to integrate enterprise applications such as ERP systems to BI solutions. Scorecards are similar to dashboards but lay more emphasis on individual accountability in achieving strategic goals. They help to lay down the key performance metrics for individuals that which helps to indicate an overall organisation's progress towards stated strategic goals.

Dashboards and Scorecards work best for executive level of summaries. The BI Pentagon of Success agrees with the fact that dashboards and scorecards are two of the most effective automation tools of measurement within a BI solutions if designed and orchestrated to full potential.

E.   Visualisation Tools

Many obtainable BI Reporting / Digital dashboard tools have amazing visualisation powers that instantly wow the audience. The impressive data manipulation features of such tools are useful for analysts who can correctly interpret the impact of slicing and dicing of data .Once preparation is done, a reliable visual tool could provide a user-friendly interface for designing the layout and displaying many fold dimensional data. The strength of such tools can be measured through considering its usability of design, the flexibility of layout and unhindered compatibility to innovative chart types.

The BI Pentagon of Success model fully promotes and supports anything which facilitates the primary goal of strengthening decision making. It indirectly brings to fore the notion that the user should only come back to the BI tool if it improves their effectiveness and efficiency.

There are several popular BI tools which come as a standalone or suites of applications. The BI tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse suites to facilitate data cleansing, online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, monitoring local information. The selection of a BI tool is highly subjective process with different users favouring different tools at different times of a project gestation. By default, a generic business intelligence solution includes a number of standard tools which are mandatory in nature. Understanding the significance and value of each tool type is key to the success of a BI implementation and in getting optimal business results.

Maninder Singh is a leader in Cloud Business Intelligence and Analytics with more than a decade of experience. He is the author of the Flagship Model: The BI Pentagon of Success. Many thanks to Hannah Jones and Harpreet Singh for their contributions to this article.

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