Whitepaper

5 Signs It’s Time You Move

Toward a Business
Intelligence Solution

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Introduction
If your enterprise is like most others, you want to make smart

business strategies and take good business decisions. Also, you

probably already possess or have access to data that can help

you in both areas. However, it may not be so obvious to decide

how to handle that data, and which approach or tool will be the

most effective. A business intelligence (BI) application is

increasingly cited as the way to get actionable insights out of the

data growing every day, to improve business performance and

results. Is it the right solution? This white paper explains how you

can decide for your own enterprise.

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Warning Signs that Information Needs are Not
Being Met
Any of the following signs could indicate that information needs and opportunities in
your enterprise are outstripping the solutions currently at its disposal:

#1
Your enterprise has lots of data, but little information. Information is data that has
been converted into useful insights, forecasts, and recommendations. For instance,
day-by-day sales figures per product sold and customer invoiced are data, whereas
quarterly sales trends, customer purchasing preferences by industry sector, and
overall ranking of products by profitability are information. Data alone is dumb, but
information can speak volumes.

#2
It takes “forever” to get business analytics reports from IT. Generating reports
from business data without a purpose-built software solution takes IT specialist skills.
The more reports you require and the more complex the data, the less your IT team
can keep up with your demands.

#3
You have hit a spreadsheet wall. Many enterprises start with Excel or another

spreadsheet application to hold and analyze their data. However, this approach can
rapidly become unmanageable, as larger datasets and files start to choke the
spreadsheet software. Attempts to break datasets down into smaller chunks may
simply push enterprises into departmental data silos that prevent good business
insights from being generated or shared.

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 #4
Joining data from different sources is a headache. Even simple differences in the
way two departments fill out spreadsheets with similar, but not identical data (for
instance, HR and Finance each with their own subsets and formats of employee
information) can make it hard to combine the spreadsheets for analysis.

#5
Your data visualization lacks insight. To tell a useful story, data visualization must
use metrics and indicators that are directly relevant to a business. Simply totaling rows
or columns and making a bar chart or a pie chart may not be enough to tell you if your
enterprise is doing well or at risk, or may lack the intuitive impact of key performance
indicators that a good business intelligence solution can produce.

The Nature of Your Data Will Determine the Right Way Forward
The more complicated your data, the bigger the challenge will be to derive business
value from it. Understanding and evaluating the complexity of your data is a key
step in deciding if a business intelligence solution is appropriate, and in mapping
out your approach. The following criteria can help:

1. Data structure. Data from different sources relating to the same subject may also be
structured differently. In the example above of the HR and Finance departments holding

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 employee information, HR might use several spreadsheets for employee personal details,
job responsibilities, and qualifications, where Finance only uses one to record insurance,
benefits, and similar data. In the different spreadsheets, employees might be listed by
grade, or by department, in overall alphabetical order, with initials only, or with both given
and family names, and so on. This is a simple example. Other differences in data structures
between business groups can be significantly more complex.

2. Data size. Data may come in gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes. However, overall volume
is not the only consideration. Data may also be organized into thousands or millions of
rows, columns, and other dimensions, needing correspondingly powerful solutions to
analyze and compare, dimension by dimension.

3. Data type. Structured data, like the neatly organized entries in a customer order database,
may also vary by alphabetical, numerical, or other data type. Unstructured data can exist in
many more forms, including freeform text and conversations on social media, graphics,
and video and audio recordings. Each one of these types of data may have a role to play in
giving your enterprise the business intelligence it needs.

4. Query language. Database systems use some sort of query language or way of asking for
data from the database. SQL (Structured Query Language) used by SQL database systems
is one common example. So-called NoSQL database systems offer different possibilities.
Some other sources of data may present their own API (application programming interface)
with its specific syntax for asking questions.

5. Data sources. The more data sources there are, the higher the chance of differences in
internal data structures and formats, or of data that has no specific format. Data from the
different sources must be brought together and harmonized in one location to ensure
comparisons and analyses are “like to like”.

6. Data detail. To make sense of complexity, some business intelligence technologies

process and group together data in advance per predefined user queries. This can help
speed up operations, but limits query possibilities for users. As markets and business
environments become more dynamic, users have a greater need to ask ad hoc questions.
Data detail and granularity should be preserved, instead working only with larger,
indivisible lumps of data.

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7. Data growth rate. The data you know today may increase in volume and variety tomorrow.
Business intelligence solutions that must start from scratch, each time datasets are
extended, updated, or added, will slow down enterprise performance and responsiveness
to changing conditions.

Beyond a certain level of data complexity or volume compared to one or more of the criteria
above, a suitable BI solution will be the only way to get real business value out of your data.

Four Steps to Get from Data to Insights

In general, complex data cannot simply be put into any kind of business intelligence system for
immediate insights and actionable results. Broadly speaking, there are four steps you must take
to generate useful BI dashboards and reports.

1. Connection to the different data sources. Data may be stored in different databases, in

your data center, in the cloud, or elsewhere. You must make a connection to each source

you want to use.

2. Data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL). The goal is to make “one truth”, with

the integration in one place of compatible, valid versions of the data from each source.

3. Querying the centralized data. User queries, whether defined in advance or ad hoc, must

be performed rapidly and efficiently. For example, Sisense business intelligence learns

about reusable chunks within each query made, maintaining flexibility and making the

system faster and smarter, as the number of users grows.

4. Data visualization. The results of the queries on the extracted, transformed, and loaded

data from the different data sources is displayed for users to consume, per their needs and

preferences.

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Alternate Business Intelligence Approaches for Complex Data
Some business intelligence systems are built rather like a manufacturing assembly line. The
steps described above are carried out with different systems, partially processed data (“work-in-
progress”) being passed from one stage to another. Total cost of ownership and lack of
flexibility in changing or extending the “assembly line” are frequent concerns.
Alternatively, in the “Single-Stack™” approach, Sisense business intelligence software is
designed from the outset to handle complex data flexibly with rapid data ingestion, integration,
and analysis. Performance is optimized for analytics for any kind of data and complex
calculations can executed on the fly (ad hoc), with clear, intuitive visualization afterwards of
results for both non-technical and technical users.

Conclusion
The need for a suitable business intelligence solution to handle complex data may become
obvious in simple ways. A current lack of actionable insights, backlogs in requests to your IT
department, and difficulties in combining multiple spreadsheets are just some examples.
Understanding and evaluating the complexity of your data against the right criteria can show you
the situation now: importantly, it can also show you how things may change in the future. You can
then determine the type of business intelligence solution that is most appropriate for your needs,
capabilities, and budget.

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