BI: Freedom From Excel Sheets

Aspreadsheet like MS Excel is the most commonly used application for analyzing data. While spreadsheets are great for analyzing data, they hit a road block when you have multiple applications. We're not saying it's impossible to do, but the whole process is usually very time consuming and error prone. In fact, in many board meetings, more time is wasted debating over the accuracy and authenticity of data being presented instead of taking strategically important decisions! If you empathize with this statement, then you have a case for exploring a Business Intelligence solution. BI used to be something that only the big boys could afford. Today however, there are more BI options available, some of which can even be deployed by smaller organizations. Here are a few things you should know if you're seriously considering to implement BI in your organization.

Analytics or report generation?: What do you need from your BI solution? Do you want to do complex analytics, or do you need simple reports? The solution you choose could vary depending upon this requirement.

Compatible databases: As BI is all about analyzing data, choice of database becomes important. It's best to choose a BI tool that's compatible with the databases running behind your business apps. This will not only minimize hassles, but it will also speed up adoption of the BI solution because your database admins and managers will learn it much faster.

Quantity of data: While choosing a BI product, consider your present data requirements and also how much it's likely to grow in future. So you have keep scalability of the BI product into consideration. BI solutions incorporate data mining algorithms, which could run quite fast for say a million rows, but when 10 million rows are executed, the system could crash. So, gauge your data volume requirements accurately and match it correspondingly to appropriate BI solution and hardware.

Inhouse or Cloud-based?: Yes, just like everything else, BI is also offered from the cloud today by several vendors. For instance, two commonly used open source reporting tools, JasperSoft (http://bit.ly /dmdpR9) and Pentaho (http://bit.ly/17K2sL) offer BI solutions in the cloud.