Business Intelligence Tool Selections: General Considerations

When we evaluate which business intelligence tool to use, the first determination is the Buy vs. Build decision. We can use the following table to compare the two approaches.

Category	Buy	Build
Cost		A
Implementation Time	A
Documentation	A
Functionality / Features	A
Tailored for the exact needs		A
Reliance on third-party		A

Clearly, both approaches have its own advantages and disadvantages, and it is often wise to consider each of the components individually. For example, it is clearly not viable to write a relational database from scratch. Therefore, we may have a case where the hardware and the database are bought, but other tools are built from within. In general, deciding which approach to go is dependent on the following criteria:

• User technical skills
• Requirements
• Available budget
• Time

Because each tool in the business intelligence arena has different functionalities, the criteria for the "Buy vs. Build" decision is different for each type. We will get into a more detailed discussion for each tool later.
Should we decide to purchase an existing third-party business intelligence tool, we must then decide which one to buy. Often, there are a number of choices to pick from, some are well-known, and some others not as well-known, but
In addition to tool functionalities, which we will discuss in the following sections, there are several considerations that we should take into account when considering tool vendors in general:

Tool Vendor's Stability: More than anything else, this is probably the most important measure. In my opinion, this is even more important than the current functionalities that the tool itself provide, for the simple reason that if the company is going to be around for a while, it will be able to make enhancements to its business intelligence tool. On the other hand, if the company is likely to be out of business in six months, then it doesn't matter that it has the state-of-the-art features, because sooner or later these features will be out-of-date.
Some of the ways to tell about company's stability are:

• What type of office space is it occupying? Is it wasting money by renting the most expensive office space in the area just so that it can be noticed? Or is it plugging all its money back into R&D so that the product can be improved?
• The background of senior management. The company might be new, but if it has seasoned veterans from major companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, to name a few, it is more likely to be successful because top management has seen how it's done right.

Support: What type of support is offered? It is industry standard for vendors to charge an annual support fee that is 15-20% of the software product license. Will any software issues be handled promptly?
Professional Services: This includes consulting and education. What type of consulting proposal does the vendor give? Is the personnel requirements and consulting rates reasonable? Is the vendor going to put in someone fresh out of college and charge $200/hr for that person? It might be wise to speak with members of the consulting team before signing on the dotted line. On the education front, what type of training is available? And how much is the consulting team willing to do knowledge transfer? Does the consulting team purposely hold off information so that either 1) you will need to send more people to vendor's education classes, or 2) you will need to hire additional consulting to make any changes to the system.

Business Intelligence Software

As the old Chinese saying goes, "To accomplish a goal, make sure the proper tools are selected." This is especially true when the goal is to achieve business intelligence. Given the complexity of the data warehousing system and the cross-departmental implications of the project, it is easy to see why the proper selection of business intelligence software and personnel is very important. This section will talk about the such selections. They are grouped into the following:

• General Considerations
• Database/Hardware
• ETL Tools
• OLAP Tools
• Reporting Tools
• Metadata Tools
• Open Source Business Intelligence Tools
• Data Warehouse Team Personnel

Business Intellegence Uses

Business intelligence usage can be categorized into the following categories:
1. Business operations reporting
The most common form of business intelligence is business operations reporting. This includes the actuals and how the actuals stack up against the goals. This type of business intelligence often manifests itself in the standard weekly or monthly reports that need to be produced.
2. Forecasting
Many of you have no doubt run into the needs for forecasting, and all of you would agree that forecasting is both a science and an art. It is an art because one can never be sure what the future holds. What if competitors decide to spend a large amount of money in advertising? What if the price of oil shoots up to $80 a barrel? At the same time, it is also a science because one can extrapolate from historical data, so it's not a total guess.
3. Dashboard
The primary purpose of a dashboard is to convey the information at a glance. For this audience, there is little, if any, need for drilling down on the data. At the same time, presentation and ease of use are very important for a dashboard to be useful.
4. Multidimensional analysis
Multidimensional analysis is the "slicing and dicing" of the data. It offers good insight into the numbers at a more granular level. This requires a solid data warehousing / data mart backend, as well as business-savvy analysts to get to the necessary data.
5. Finding correlation among different factors
This is diving very deep into business intelligence. Questions asked are like, "How do different factors correlate to one another?" and "Are there significant time trends that can be leveraged/anticipated?"