Choosing a Business Intelligence (BI) Tool

April 26, 2010 @ 1:31 pm
by Bob Lautenbach
Filed under: BI Tags: BI

BI has been around for a long time, but only in the past five or so years has it really taken off, both in the buzzword department and as a real solution to business problems. If done right, BI empowers members of your organization (and your clients if needed), by providing them tools to report against and analyze real-time or semi-real-time data.

In the old days, reporting was a tedious process, and from the business perspective, appeared to take forever. Here’s a likely scenario: you think of a report you need, you write-up your report request, send it to the IT dungeon, and in 2-3 weeks you are informed it is available from menu “X” in system “Y”. You get excited, login, only to find the layout wrong or groupings off. You start the request process all over again (fun times!).

With a BI tool at your users fingertips, they can sort, group, heatmap, piechart, export, and print to their hearts content. Never having to request another report from IT again (well, almost never). BI tools increase productivity and add efficiencies to an organization. There is one caveat. You organization must be ready for BI. If your user base is not able (through lack of training) or not willing (fears change, afraid of technology or are just plain lazy) to use your shiny new BI solution, your investment was wasted. Be sure to get your people on-board and excited about BI and what it can mean for them before you make a purchase.

I recently implemented a BI solution for mid-sized client and thought I would share some of the things I think should be included in every BI offering. Most of the items I will mention are provided by the major vendors such as;

The list below outlines items I feel are critical in a BI package. It is by no means all-inclusive.

A BI tool should:

Offer various Charting/Heatmap options
Provide the ability to sort, group and parameterize reports (some vendors do not support the HAVING clause from within the report designer. In that case, you will need to implement HAVING statements at the database level)
Provide the ability to schedule reports (and auto-email/deliver..in various formats)
Offer logging of user access to the system (an audit trail)
Provide the ability to hide data objects from select users, but still allow them to run reports on those data sources (via permissions)
Provide the ability to share reports with other users
Provide the ability to filter data by user group to limit access to data (by client, region, etc.). When a user logs in, you may want to restrict them to certain data, a single client for instance. The BI tool should be able to handle that level of restriction.
Offer multiple options for login security such as, single-sign-on, windows authentication as well as traditional forms authentication. (most vendors offer single-sign-on capability but be sure to look closely at their specific implementation to ensure it meets your security requirements)
Provide the ability to export reports to various formats
Provide the ability to add calculated columns and aggregate summaries
Allow you to name you database columns anything you like (sounds strange, but we encountered a parser that did not like the words UPDATE or DELETE in any part of a field name..i.e.: last_updated_by)
Allow users to use a field as a parameter, but restrict users from displaying the field on a report. For example, I should be able to query by SSN, but I would rather my users never display a full SSN on report. In that instance, I would offer a masked SSN field for display.
Allow the System Admin user that typically comes with a BI Tool to actually have full Admin rights across the entire application. This again might sound strange, but I recently used a product that provided a system admin but certain permissions where denied to the admin as you moved throughout the system. The workaround was creating group admins for each user group in the system. Very tedious and not intuitive.
Provide a metadata layer where you can add user friendly field names, descriptions and even formating information per data object.
Provide the ability to create relationships between objects (in case its not already done at the database layer)
Provide the ability to auto-hide unrelated data objects. Essentially, if you select a data object (object “X”) for a report and no relationships to other data objects have been defined, then after you select object “X”, all other available data objects auto-hide from view (making them unavailable for that specific report). This is a great feature especially in less sophisticated organizations, as it helps avoid producing run-away queries.

Most, not all, of the BI offerings I mentioned at the beginning of this post have the features I listed above (some more quirky than others). Each organizations needs are unique, so in the end you will need to marry features to your specific requirements. However, I have found that the items above are core to most business needs. Take your time and test-drive each product on your potential buy list. You will be glad you did. Happy BI Hunting.

Bayside Technology, LLC

Choosing a Business Intelligence (BI) Tool