4 Business Intelligence And Analytics Best Practices: Fuel Your Brain, Save Time And Avoid Risk By Embracing Choice
The business intelligence and analytics market are changing rapidly. Gone are the days of only being limited to one tool to explore, discover and deliver insights on your data.
At the heart of strong analytics, philosophy is the people who need access to data having a choice to use the tools they are most comfortable with. In some cases, the answer might be enhancing reports or dashboards, in other cases, it is providing self-service analytics tools. In other cases, it might be ditching the dashboards and reports in favor of something less traditional.
Employing data analytics tools is crucial for an ever-changing business environment. To keep up with those changes enterprises need to be aware of what the market offers so they can understand where to make investments in people, process and technology. However, with so many analytics solutions vendors, picking one (or a few) can be frustrating. It is also can be easy to fall into top trends and “all in one” offerings.
Four Things To Keep In Mind
According to best practices, here are four things business intelligence tools should serve. Keep them in mind as you consider analytics solutions:
1. Free Your Data
In the loudest William Wallace, you can muster, yell “Freedom!” for your data. Ensure your predictive modeling, data mining, business intelligence, and machine learning tools do not create barriers to a critical resource, data. Any BI platforms that lock, hide or want to “own” the data should be avoided. If you ever decide to switch to another tool then what? Avoid solutions where data is not well-abstracted from the tool or not portable.
2. Data Access Increases Analytics Velocity
By providing access to data quickly, business users can realize the value of powerful analytic storytelling to shape the critical business decisions they must make. Make sure your tool(s) allow integration with data sources and third-party tools. If data is “locked” away in external platforms or internal systems, this ensures that your analytic efforts will face roadblocks in delivering the value you want them to provide.
3. Automation For Analytics Productivity
You should have the data pipelines and storage systems needed to fuel your analytic discovery and storytelling. This is almost always something that tool vendors do not discuss. Data pipelines are the fuel for your data management processes, data warehouses systems that enable success with analytics and business intelligence tools. Without them (1) and (2) become difficult (if not impossible).
4. Deliver Value
You might not always know the question you need to ask of your data, regardless if it is “big data” or small data. Discovering new insights hidden in your data means having the data available for query. Your analytics toolkit should help you explore iteratively; quickly determining the value of a question and discarding it if it serves no utility. Your analytics and business intelligence tools, process and data should be aligned with this reality. The more “static” your model, the greater resistance to change it will have.
Analytics and Business Intelligence Tools: One Size Does Not Fit All
If your Business Intelligence team uses SAP, and your agency partner uses Tableau, no need to just pick one tool, use both at the same time. Here are a few BI tools that are market leaders:
Analytics, Visualization & Reporting Tools
- Tableau Software. Tableau BI software platform offers 14-day free trial.
- TIBCO Spotfire. Tibco offers to experience the full capability of Spotfire on a desktop or in a browser with a 30-day free trial.
- Birst. To try Birst free, you can sign up here.
- Mode Analytics. Mode offers a 14-day free trial.
- Periscope Data. To sign up for a Periscope Data free trial follow this link.
- Redash. Redash has paid options and offers a free 30-day trial as well as open-source platform.
- QlikView. Try QlikView Personal Edition for free before purchasing Qlik’s business discovery software.
- Chartio. Chartio offers a 14-day free trial.
- Looker. To request a free 21-day trial of Looker click here.
- Microsoft Excel ODBC: Connecting Excel to your database.
- “R” Statistical Software. R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. Click here to learn more.
- Other business intelligence solutions and open source statistical framework and tools
Chat Tool
A less traditional approach is turning your chat client (ie., Slack, Skype, HipChat…) into an analytics platform.
- Chatlytics https://www.chatlytics.co
Storing All Your Data
To analyze big data sets, you need to store that data someplace that has the scale, performance, and power needed to get the job done — a data warehouse. This article covers key features and benefits widely used cloud-based data warehouse solutions:
Go Ahead, Experiment!
When data is open and unified, you unlock the potential for teams to derive more value from it. It should be everyone's goal to make data open and unified that support standards-based connections to leading analytics and data visualization software packages.
Data cleanly abstracted from your analytics environment ensures you are not limited to selecting just one way of doing things. You have the option to use an incredibly diverse array of tools that you can to explore, analyze and visualize data. Tell your data stories the way you want, with the tools that you know are right for the job! If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to hello@openbridge.com or set up a call with our team. We are happy to discuss your analytics needs in more depth.
DWant to discuss a BI pilot or proof-of-concept for your organization? Need a platform and team of experts to kickstart your data and analytic efforts? We can help! Getting traction adopting new technologies, especially if it means your team is working in different and unfamiliar ways, can be a roadblock for success. This is especially true in a self-service only world. If you want to discuss a proof-of-concept, pilot, project or any other effort, the Openbridge platform and team of data experts are ready to help.
Reach out to us at hello@openbridge.com. Prefer to talk to someone? Set up a call with our team of data experts.
Visit us at www.openbridge.com to learn how we are helping other companies with their data efforts.
