8 Tips for Choosing the Right BI Tool

Published in

Bold BI

7 min readApr 6, 2023

Business Intelligence (BI) tools allow for efficient data storage, analysis, and prediction of future business performance. They employ a range of methods to convert data into valuable insights that data analysts can use to make decisions regarding the present and future progress of their department. They offer customized dashboards and reports for different departments and users. With BI tools, organizations can identify patterns and trends in their data, leading to improved profitability.

However, before we delve into these tools’ specifics, let’s first understand what BI tools are.

What are business intelligence tools?

Business intelligence is the use of technology, processes, and strategies to analyze and transform raw data into actionable insights that can be used to make informed business decisions. BI tools are software applications that collect, manage, and interpret large amounts of data from both internal and external sources. Structured and unstructured data are presented in the form of reports, dashboards, graphs, and other visual representations.

Why BI tools are essential

Different organizations use BI tools for different purposes. Let’s see some of the reasons.

Easy gathering of relevant data

Using BI tools allows you to centralize the various data sources in your organization into a single data entry. This lets you have only a single point of view of all your business processes. This practice helps data analysts in your company save on the time they use to collect, organize, and study a business and avoid doing redundant work. It also helps to reduce human errors, identify trends, perform cross-sectional analysis, and more.

Reduces operational cost

With the help of BI tools, companies can scrutinize their operational costs during a specific timeframe based on the data displayed on their dashboard. This facilitates the identification of areas where resources were expended excessively, allowing them to devise effective strategies and plans to avert similar issues in the future.

Exposes new business opportunities for growth

Having all the relevant data from your organization accessible through a single dashboard can enhance your ability to visualize current trends and patterns in market and sales. This enables you to identify new opportunities and make informed decisions on how to pursue them more effectively.

Easy gathering of customer feedback

BI tools and dashboards can aid organizations in gathering and analyzing customer data, allowing them to evaluate their thoughts on products, services, and brands. This enables companies to assess their efforts in meeting customer needs and identify areas that require improvement.

Accuracy in business prediction

The utilization of artificial intelligence in business intelligence tools provides the capability to comprehend both historical and present outcomes within your organization. This, in turn, grants you the ability to gain valuable insights into recurring trends and patterns, which can then be leveraged to make informed decisions and predictions with greater accuracy.

Optimizes business spending

Using BI tools can help you to easily gather insights and data into your operational expenses over a given financial year, making it easier for you to identify how resources were distributed and spent within that period. This lets you have a clear view of your spending, thus enabling you to formulate better strategies that will help you optimize your spending to maximize business profitability.

Now that you have learned why organizations use BI tools, let’s see some of the ways in which businesses use these BI tools.

Different types of BI tools you can use

There are several types of BI tools available, including:

Reporting tools: These BI tools allow users to create and share reports that summarize data.
Self-service BI tools: These tools allow users to access and analyze data without IT assistance.
Data-mining tools: These tools analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns and relationships that can be used to make predictions.
Dashboards: These are BI tools that provide a visual representation of data that can be used to monitor and analyze KPIs and metrics.
Data visualization tools: These tools help create visual representations of your data, such as charts and graphs, making it easier to understand and analyze.
Data discovery tools: These tools allow you to explore your data and discover new insights.
Ad-hoc reporting tools: These are software applications that allow users to create and generate customized reports on an as-needed basis without requiring the help of IT or data specialists.
Predictive analytics tools: These tools help identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data, using data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques.
Mobile BI tools: These tools are software applications that allow users to access and analyze business data using mobile devices.

8 tips for choosing the right BI tool

Choose the best BI tools for your business based on the needs of your company. Here are some of the guidelines for choosing the best solutions for your business.

1. Ensure that the BI tool selected is self-service

Choosing a BI tool that embraces self-services can help in simplifying data visualizations. This will favor both technical and non-technical workers in your organization, allowing your end users to get more control over the way they view their data.

2. Choose a BI tool that supports teamwork

Choose a tool that supports collaboration and teamwork as this will enable multiple people to work together on analyzing data, sharing insights, and making informed decisions collaboratively, which can benefit the organization as a whole.

3. Cost-effective

While choosing the right BI tools for your organization, consider the prices. Choose a BI tool that is less expensive to allow your business to keep growing without issues like frustrating roadblocks and excess fees.

4. Ensure that the BI tool selected supports real-time decision-making

Select a BI tool that gives real-time insights to facilitate real-time decision-making. This helps you increase your return on investment, improves productivity, and eliminates bottlenecks in your business.

5. Select a BI tool that has a high security value

Choose a BI tool that has encryption and protection to secure your company’s sensitive data. This will prevent data breaches and unauthorized access.

6. Integration

Choose a BI tool that can easily integrate with various data sources to allow users to easily customize their dashboards, reports, and other data visualizations according to their specific needs.

7. Ensure it offers good customer support

Choose a BI tool with good customer support to help you address any technical issues efficiently, maximize the tool’s potential, and improve user experience.

8. Evaluate ease of use

Choosing a BI tool that is user friendly is important, as it can lead to increased accessibility, time, cost savings, and increased adoption.

Choosing Bold BI as your business intelligence tool

Bold BI is one of best embedded analytics tools for 2023. It allows you to glean insights from your complex data by visualizing it using a wide range of widgets, hundreds of data sources, and rich interactive capabilities to improve your business operations. Some prominent features are:

Data visualization

Bold BI visualizes metrics in the form of interactive dashboards with attractive widgets like charts, grids, and maps. These widgets are not only easy to read, but easy to create. Even employees with little tech know-how can display the metrics they need in Bold BI’s dashboards.

Data preparation

Bold BI offers data preparation features that make your job easier, like visual data modelling, calculated fields, and the Data Integration Platform. Also, with Bold BI, there is no requirement to bring all your data into one data store. You can connect to any data store of your choice directly.

Data connectivity

Bold BI lets you connect with over 130 data sources like NoSQL, relational, REST API, big data, and local file sources. You can also directly connect to popular data warehouses like Amazon Redshift Google Big Query, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and more.

Data customization

Embedded analytics needs to be customizable and extensible to meet the specific needs of your applications. Bold BI provides features like theming and event handling that make it especially suited for embedded use.

Predictive analytics

With Bold BI, you can display results from predictive models produced using other machine learning environments. Additionally, you can use built-in methods available for forecasting to help stakeholders identify business risks and understand trends.

Data security

Bold BI grants granular control over access permissions and data security at rest or in transit, ensuring that your data is secure and compliant with industry standards.

Designed for embedding

You can display your business application, website or portal, and analytics together with the embedding capabilities of Bold BI, such as automated provisioning and single sign-on with Office 365, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID integration. You can deploy on Windows, Docker, Linux, Kubernetes, and Azure App Service.

To learn more about Bold BI and its various features, refer to this link.

We hope this article gives you a good overview of BI tools and the various ways to use them in your organization. Try Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website, or if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.

We also suggest you have a look at our other blog posts on business intelligence to learn more about tips for using BI tools effectively:

Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on April 6, 2023.