Business Intelligence &
Analysis
Products Scan & Evaluation
Before analyzing the tools I would like
to give a simple explanation of as to what Business Intelligence is. It is one
of those buzz words that everyone uses but not everyone clearly understands it.
The best definition that I found on the
internet is:
Computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing 'hard' business data,
such as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs and incomes. Objectives of a BI exercise include
(1) understanding of a firm's internal and
external strengths and weaknesses, (2) understanding
of the relationship between different data for
better decision making,
(3) detection of opportunities for innovation, and (4) cost reduction and optimal deployment of resources.
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| 1. The steps to achieve Business Intelligence |
The best way to learn
a new word would be to use it in a sentence hence, use this term in a sentence:
The man used his business intelligence to build up his business's profits and stocks while also bringing down other business competition.
You could try too!
So getting back to tools, I am going to
analyze 5 Tools based on the following criteria’s. Before going into the
comparison let me give a brief description of each of these criteria’s:
- Usability & visualization: This criteria necessitates the ease of use of the tool. Mainly describes how a user can navigate through the tool to get his/her work done. The questions that need to be answered to check whether the tool is easy to use or not are is it easy to learn? Does it support Mobile intelligence? Types of graphs and visualization that can be used? For a tool to be good enough a good score for this criteria is a necessity.
- Scalability: It is extremely important in terms of identifying how much data the tool can handle. In this world of Big Data this is a very essential factor in picking the right tool.
- Data Integration: This is essential for a BI tool with to be able to integrate data from different sources. There is a whole lot of unstructured data which needs to be structured and then be used to make better decisions. Hence this criteria needs to have a good score.
- Cost Effectiveness: This is one of the major drivers behind the decision of which product could be used. Depending on the type of business and the budget the organization has set in spending on these tools. The cost score will be based on the basic and enterprise version of the tool.
- Customer Support: The score of this criteria is important to identify the level with which the product provides customer service. This could be in the form of answering customer questions, documentation of the product and the methods to use it, quality support and the rate at which the company provides services. In this era of internet it also includes blogs and online support.
- Infrastructure & Architecture: This category measures how well the tool supports IT infrastructure. Mainly which operating system and which server platforms are supported. It also takes care of important factors like re-usability, caching, zero-footprint, load balancing, fail-over and In-Memory techniques.
- Predictive Analysis & Data Mining: This criteria examines if and how data and text mining is supported and to what degree. Data mining is widely used to be able to predict behavior of customers, vendors, web visitors whereas text mining is mainly being used to mine Twitter messages.
- Search & Alerting: This functionality is necessary in order to make searches on large data sets and metadata along with the ability of a tool to alert in case of anomalies or different trends.
The tools recommended should provide
following features for it to be acceptable:
∞ Reporting (KPIs, metrics)
∞ Ad hoc querying
∞ OLAP (cubes, slice & dice,
drilling)
∞ Dashboards/scorecards
∞ Operational/real-time BI
∞ Automated monitoring/alerting
These are some well-
known tools used in the industry today:
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| 2. Tools available in the market |
Out of these I will
be further analyzing the following tools:
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| 3. Weighted Matrix for the tools |
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| 4. Graphical Representation of the Matrix |
It is
known for its intuitiveness and it makes it very easy regardless of
technological know-how of a person. The platform is compared to Excel in terms
of its ease of use and it very but is very feature rich. It creates sharable
dashboards, interactive reporting and has flexible features and scalability.
This is the tool that is used by most of the industries as it is the smartest
tool of all. Exactly why it’s ranked first.
This product is
very useful for companies with major BI needs. The enterprise edition
integrates Oracle’s other tools and products. Hence this product can be used
for any visualization, reporting or information manipulation. This is ranked
second as it understands BI needs of an organization at a higher level.
Fun Fact: The
University of Arizona uses this tool
This product
falls under IBM’s contribution to BI. It is a web based solution to company
analytics. It can be used for any business. It provides the capabilities
of creating Dashboards, reports, detailed analysis and scorecarding to allow
automation of business metrics to help companies get a better insight into
their data.
This product is
known for easily converting unstructured big data to structured data. This tool
is very easy to use and can be used by anyone with beginner level database
skills in an organization to make instant visualizations and reports. It also
provides location based analysis which is great asset to e-commerce websites.
This is also known
for its user friendliness that connects the gap between techy BI tools and
traditional productivity apps, It has a clean interface and is capable of most
of the features a BI tool should have with visually appealing dashboards in easy
to understand format.
References:
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