How to choose BI/BA solution for SMB

BANGALORE, INDIA: We tell you about the three key factors that matter, and help you cut through the clutter while zeroing on a BI solution for your business

Hiren Mehta

Business Analytics is no longer a technology that only large enterprises can afford. Today, even SMEs can benefit from this technology, because, if done right, the deployment of BI / BA tools can potentially result in high RoI. There are tools and complete solutions available that can help SMEs analyze their business data and make more effective and timely business decisions. But how do SMEs decide which business analytics and intelligence tool is right for their business needs? What technologies should they already have as a pre-requisite? In what form should their data be to smoothly integrate such tools into their system?

Answering these questions can help decide upon the right business analytics and intelligence tool. In this article, we look at some essential factors that SMEs need to know before they choose a business intelligence/business analytics solution.

What's more, it improved reporting thereby making information available in a timely manner for better business decisions. The ability to create ad-hoc reports at user level increased employee productivity and performance as well. Empowered as it is today, Sharda Motor is able to transform insights into action as they are able to assemble relevant business information in a unified workspace with reports and dashboards; analyze it to make fact-based recommendations from the desktop, the web or from within Microsoft Excel; and act on findings with plans and forecasts.

An agreed and documented set of requirements

At the outset, it will be helpful to understand what differentiates business analytics from business intelligence, since both are meant to help your planning. Business analytics is more flexible than business intelligence. If you are looking for a BI tool, chances are that you will be using a pre-defined collection of parameters which you will use in analysing your past data. BA, on the other hand, allows you to be more flexible in terms of what methods and policies you follow while using essentially the same technologies and apps. This happens in a more frequent manner than BI. BI resembles more of typical database operations, where you query facts, whereas BA allows you to dig at a deeper level and model what-if scenarios as well as optimal outcomes.

Also read: Indian SMEs trust cloud: Microsoft study

With that distinction out of the way, you need to be very clear on what do you aim to do with your data. Do you want to generate typical reports that can describe what is going on at a glance ? Do you want to draw trends and recognise specific patterns or groups in your data ? Do you want to get estimates on what can happen next ? You need to fix your goal first. This is not to say that you can achieve only one of these objectives at a time though. Irrespective of your domain, BI / BA tools can be of immense use to you.

Ready-to-use data

Once you have a well-defined goal, you need to ascertain whether the data at hand is suitable enough to base your decisions on. This is different from the technicalities of compatibility of your data and the tool which you plan to use. In general, the higher amount of data you have(till a reasonable threshold), the more reliable your results will be. This data of course should be intact and high-quality. You cannot perform what-if analysis to predict sales if you have available records of only 3 months distributed across the year.

Having all the data in a ready-to-use form is no doubt a rigorous exercise, as much as is separating the relevant data from the irrelevant, but as far as your use of BI / BA tools are concerned, the investment will pay off at the end. This applies very well in case you want to perform targeted marketing of your products and services. This is not as daunting as it sounds, you do not necessarily need to have a full-blown data warehouse in order to benefit from BI/ BA tools. You need to strike a balance between using relatively scarce well-defined, structured data and more abundant, more useful (but less structured) data, because these two types of data have their characteristic merits and demerits for using in BI / BA applications.

Marketplace and regulatory awareness

Over the last few years, many vendors have launched their BI / BA offerings. Some of them offer a consolidated , integrated approach, whereas some are specialised to cater to a specific domain. If you want to get the very best returns from your investment, you may want to consider the feasibility of integrating different specialised solutions into your business and compare that against the benefits obtained by deploying a packaged, generalised solution in your organization. When you are dealing with massive amounts of data, you must keep in mind that not all of it needs to be available to everyone using the tool. When you deal with sensitive information, care must be taken to follow the laws and see how best your chosen solution complies with legal / auditing requirements that are applicable to your organization's data.

Source: http://pcquest.www.ciol.com/