Business Intelligence, the good and the bad, but mostly bad

Let’s break down the current BI industry. For this large swath of users, there are three primary ways to get useful information: in-app analytics, industry reports, and business intelligence tools. What do I mean by business intelligence tools? A quick google search brought up plenty of familiar names (GoodData, Looker, SiSense, Tableau, Domo, Qlik) alongside the big guys one would expect in any sort of computing battle (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM).

In-App Analytics

• The good: Most of the time, these free or low-cost built-in tools, graphs, insights, and metrics usually don’t require any significant modifications. What’s not to like? For example, the GoodData-powered analytics in Zendesk provides ticket volumes, call volumes, close rates, frequency distributions, time to resolution, and resolutions on the first attempt, which is all really cool stuff. It’s displayed in a fairly easy to digest manner, and enough toggles to keep me busy for a few minutes. Another example is the Square merchant dashboard, which gives a boatload of fun insights — total sales, upcoming deposits, returning customers, and items purchased.
• The Bad: By default, these built-in app-level analytics are just that: app-level. Can Square report on YouTube channel engagement? Can it help compare or calculate the impact of rent or utility rates on profit? No. What about Zendesk? Can it shed light on customer retention rate or customer lifetime value? What about profit on a particular sale? No.
• Long story short: An inch deep and an inch wide

Without broad context, these types of apps are limited in scope — both about the business and about the industry they’re in. Simply put, they’re stuck with just the the data in their own system. When the average SMB in America uses between 13 and 20 SaaS applications to run their business, can any single one really claim to give a useful view of the business? No.

Industry Reports:

• The good: Industry reports are typically in-depth analyses of a particular niche or industry. Given that these are for SMBs, these are not likely professional analyst reports sold to bankers, investors, or the heavy hitters in the market. Just the same, we’re still talking about well-researched reports with references and some original investigative work. They give trends in the industry, examples of breakaway success, and broad insights into what has made a particular company or group of companies successful.They usually contain context and insight tailored to whatever type of business the SMB is in. Clearly they’re created by smart people who know what they’re talkinging about. They give me advice and even occasionally explain it.
• The bad: These reports don’t come out often enough to have value for SMBs. Industry reports take a lot of work to build, and the good ones only come out quarterly or annually. That’s not exactly well timed to help with everyday business decisions or strategic planning. Also, while tailored to an industry, they’re completely unrelated to any specific business. They also lack real competitive value because they’re available to everyone at the same time and in the same fashion.
• The nutshell: Ten miles wide and ten miles deep.

Without specificity to a particular business, timely results, or the option to immediately act upon the information, these reports remain too broadly informational and entirely devoid of tactical value. Most often a well-written report that raises important industry observations will result in more questions from the business owner rather than actionable insights or guidance.

Big BI Tools

• The good: Admittedly, there is plenty to love here — deep, powerful reports, the ability to dig deeper and explore in a thousand different ways. In fact, a good BI tools can span a company’s entire data set. These tools pull from everywhere and can allow the user to configure almost any combination of data points into a visualization that can display almost anything. Built on the next generation of computing methodologies and borrowing from the data science breakthroughs of the past, each of these tools could easily answer a thousand questions you come up with, all at the tips of your thoroughly trained fingertips, or ready to be surfaced by your team of data scientists.
• The bad: It’s all about money, time, and complexity. The base cost of the product is somewhere between $300 and $5,000 monthly. If that’s not too much to swallow, these tools often require as many as 180 days of professional onboarding, which costs around $20,000. If that’s still doable, remember that most of these companies then provide ongoing guidance and training to the tune of about $2,000 a month. One of the most common complaints about BI tools — even in sponsored content from a B.I. tool — is that they’re hard to use. They often require specialized training and a lengthy onboarding process for each user. Once that’s all done, you still have to define what metrics you want to see, and by virtue of doing that, the business owner is forced to bring in another consultant or spend valuable time researching the importance of a particular metric.
• Executive summary: I haven’t got time (or money) for the pain.

These tools presume that the user is an expert in their industry, understands the most important things they should be tracking, and is able to elucidate those ideas clearly. It also assumes a large budget and often a dedicated internal person or team who can learn the system inside and out, manage the onboarding process, and be up on the industry research. Include the cost of professional services, training, the actual platform or tool, and the on boarding time. Sadly, after all that cost and effort, these tools are just that — tools. Nuanced, complicated, and powerful, but fundamentally unintelligent tools, placed in the hands of the business to use as they see fit.

There’s got to be a better way

With an incredible amount of data available at the end of an API or two and industry reports defining what is important for each vertical or business model, why hasn’t business intelligence gone further? Is it really too difficult to give SMBs out-of-the-box functionality that’s truly customized to their industry, with built-in best practices and education? Why is this entire market segment left in the dark, despite being in critical need of a solution? Nearly every review of BI tools echoes one or all of these sentiments.

While I understand the enterprise segment is a massive money-maker, it’s incredibly fickle, demanding, and complex. By the time a company has built a BI tool for the enterprise market, it must charge incredibly high prices to make the development worthwhile. And once customers are buying it, no one will be happy with the same or similar offering being made available to the SMB market at a low price. In the end, a massive portion of the most sensitive, growing businesses that power America’s economy are being left in the dark.