Today’s BI is different from the tradition, and has gradually transitioned to self-help and business-oriented mode. From an IT perspective, IT should also adopt a collaborative approach that involves the business at all levels in the overall initiative, but this may require support and encouragement from higher level leadership.

This paper will focus on the evaluation and selection of BI analysis platform, including the following 5 aspects and 8 suggestions.

1, the division of the involved population

There are three groups of people involved in the business intelligence analysis process, and each stage has a clear primary role:

  • IT/ Business Intelligence Specialist – Performs all initial setup tasks, including software installation, user preconfiguration, access rights, regulatory oversight, and certain development tasks (content and data sources).

  • Business Analyst – Performs most content creation tasks, including data preparation, free-form exploration, content enhancement, and data validation.

  • Information consumers – primarily accessing and interacting with collated content and trusted data sources, mostly leading management.

The purpose of population division is to help sort out the needs of different people, which can be taken into account in project planning.

2. Ease of use of BI analysis platform

Traditional BI is highly professional and difficult to use. In the past few years, BI was often put aside. Now, to choose BI platform, we need to consider whether it is easy to use and get started.

  • Can the entire BI analysis workflow be executed seamlessly on your own platform?

  • Does the platform provide connectivity to various data sources (such as relational, multidimensional, cloud)

  • Will the platform be able to scale over time to accommodate increasing amounts of data and more users?

  • Can BI platform administrators easily install, configure, and manage the platform?

  • Can data analysts easily prepare data and collate data sources?

  • Can information consumers easily find, view, and interact with available analysis?

3, interaction,

In the process of data analysis, a Dashboard that can meet the needs of analysts should be able to analyze freely and change and increase the dimension and scope of analysis through some operations to increase the depth of business analysis. Therefore, consider:

  • Can predefined or custom layered structures be used to drill up and down?

  • Can you interact with parameters to change analysis views or perform what-if analysis/scenario modeling?

  • Can the analysis scope be changed by filtering controls?

  • Can you change the analysis view or analysis scenario?

4. Analysis and exploration

Data visualization tools, used to build charts, and rich visualization analysis tools, which use visualization as the primary analysis rendering method. Consideration needs to be given to the freedom of analysis and exploration of business people, such as FineBI’s SPA spiral aggregation capabilities, which meet the following requirements.

  • Support for simple processing (filtering, calculating) of data during front-end analysis.

  • Support for fleshing out existing data models to create new dimensions and metrics for analysis.

  • Ability to combine and group related data points to generate new fields in the data model to simplify analysis.

5. View and share

In traditional BUSINESS intelligence analysis, the report is usually printed or exported and sent to the leader’s email address.

Modern viewing methods have changed, and mobile devices and large screen devices have become popular. Therefore, consider:

  • Does the viewing and analysis process support presentation and interaction on different resolutions and devices (tablets, phones, large screens)?

  • Can analysis be embedded in an organization’s Web portal or business systems such as OA and CRM?

  • Can I access the Internet for viewing and sharing?

  • In terms of collaboration, whether analysis can be carried out through wechat, Dingding and other office social tools (notes, comments, etc.)

  • Is there a permission setting and approval process in the process?

6, control

It is important to consider flexibility when choosing a BI analytics platform to meet the different needs of the business unit. For example, in the transition from traditional BI platform to modern platform, we can choose to use modern platform in the traditional way in the initial stage, and then gradually expand the functions that users can access by themselves. It is equally important, however, to evaluate the different capabilities of the platform in two different but related areas of “data governance” and “analytical governance” to ensure flexibility to adapt to the needs of future extensions or changes to the governance model.