Common Traits of the Best BI Tools
With today’s advanced technologies, businesses can access data-driven tools and strategies to help them understand their market needs better. These Business intelligence (BI) tools combine applications, infrastructure, best practices, and intelligent strategies to collect, analyze, and integrate critical information such as marketing trends, sales volume, and financial status of the company.
This allows managers and executives to make critical decisions that enable a business to adapt to the quick market changes eliminating delays and inefficiencies. Even better, they can do so on their own terms and whenever they’d like, with no need for assistance from computing experts, data managers or IT personnel.
Here are 5 common traits of the best BI tools.
Affordability
The cost of information technology services and solutions has drastically decreased over the years, due to advanced innovations making BI accessible to small and medium businesses. The best BI tools are affordable to acquire and offer low running costs.
The Visual Effect
Given the main purpose of a business intelligence tool is to give thorough and specific data in an easy and simplified manner, data visualization is an integral component of any BI tool. Most BI solutions utilize visual graphics and charts. However, not all graphs can transform information into an actionable visual representation. The best BI tools enable the customization of dashboards such as displaying the status of key performance indicators on one side and other business metrics on the other side. They also communicate the right information across different aspects of the business and give large volumes of data in a user-friendly manner.
Simple To Use And Implement
Most traditional BI solutions required specific expertise and knowledge to build and generate reports. This both strains resources and slows the reporting process. The best contemporary BI solutions employ user interfaces that allow executives to get their reports without depending upon the help of others.
Unified Data Sources
Another common trait of good BI tools is the ability to combine data from different sources and present it in one visual presentation. It can be both time-consuming and tiring to analyze data from different sources. Modern BI tools provide data and insight from multiple sources such as a variety of Excel spreadsheets within one dashboard. This gives a clear picture of the data and enables users to grasp all relevant information at once.
Security
Another crucial aspect of the best business intelligence tools is data security and privacy. Most BI vendors utilize access control mechanisms, data encryption, and passwords to control admittance in order to prevent unauthorized people from accessing the information. The terms of service offered by a vendor will typically indicate level of security provided. These should read thoroughly to prevent untoward surprises.
Underutilization
Unfortunately, too many companies are overlooking them, which is one of the most remarkable of the common traits of the best BI tools. Or, they have them, but haven’t convinced the rank and file of the advantages of using them to their full capabilities. This is true, even though leveraging BI tools offers decision-makers a wide range of advantageous insights, such as the latest trends in their markets, which could lead to increased sales, improved efficiency and greater profitability. Sadly, far too many organizations have yet to weave the employment of BI tools into the fabric of their cultures. However, this factor presents an outstanding opportunity for forward-thinking organizations to gain advantages on their competitors.
