Critical Capabilities for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms
April 1, 2017
The business intelligence (BI) market has shifted to more user-driven, agile development of visual, interactive dashboards with data from a broader range of sources. This white paper describes how core capabilities from traditional BI vendors have largely caught up to data discovery vendors who initially disrupted this market, although differences remain at the subcriteria level and in the degree of excellence exhibited.
The next wave of disruption in the form of smart data discovery has begun, with larger vendors innovating first or acquiring start-ups. Although this is a crowded market, significant differences remain in functionality and in which products are most appropriate for a given use case.
Data and analytics leaders should:
- Expand BI and analytics tool portfolios beyond traditional BI platforms
- Assess which BI and analytics products are best for your organization based on the use cases needed by each business function
- Establish the degree to which centralized IT teams can keep up with demand for new data sources and analyses, along with the skills levels and readiness of business units to perform more of their own data preparation and analytics
- Embrace easier-to-use, more-agile tools as greater responsibility for analytics shifts to lines of business
- Assess the measures that directly influence customer satisfaction with a BI and analytics vendor on top of an evaluation of functionality, integration, and cost-of-ownership requirements