What is BI. business intelligence

• Translation

When trying to evaluate various BI platforms, it is often difficult to understand where is the myth and where is the truth, since each vendor positions its product as “the best on the market”, citing hundreds of subjective reviews flooding the Internet as an argument. If you want to figure out which tool is right for your company without scrolling through hundreds of pages of “honest” opinions, then below is what you need.

We'll take a look at the most popular platforms such as QlikView, Klipfolio, Tableau, and Power BI and compare their key features: usability, price, ease of installation, support, work with different data types, and more. So go ahead!

All this, together or separately, opens up huge opportunities for analyzing various metrics, creating and customizing unique visualizations, in order to ultimately extract useful information for business from any data.

The platform also focused on compatibility with various devices, from smartphones and tablets to Smart TVs in conference rooms.

Peculiarities

Klipfolio is best suited for real-time monitoring and control of continuous data streams, when data dynamics are important and important decisions need to be made quickly.

Key Features

• Integration of various data sources into one report.
• Unlimited number of potentially connected users.
• Management of rights and restrictions on access to important information.
• Availability on mobile operating systems (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows).
• Flexible REST connector for connecting special data sources.
• Support for Excel, CSV, JSON, XML, etc.
• The ability to add convenient annotations to reports that will be visible to end users.
• Automatic KPI setting system.
• Ability to easily add threshold indicators to charts.

Ease of use

You can build dozens in Klipfolio various types charts, including pie charts, bar charts, area charts, and many more combinations. Also, a user who knows HTML and CSS can create their own, unique visualizations by applying all the necessary components to the dashboard through a WYSIWYG editor, and more complex chart elements can be added using various formulas and functions. Thus, with the help of Klipfolio, you can present information in almost any form, but first you need to think about how to prepare the data.

Price

As one of the oldest players in the BI industry with vast experience, today Klipfolio is betting on its cloud solutions. Klipfolio Dashboard (as a SaaS) is offered at a per user price starting (with some variations) at $19/month. This plan can be customized and add additional options. A 14-day trial period is also possible.

tableau

Another big platform is Tableau. Like most BI tools, Tableau specializes in data analysis through data visualization. It is easy to create interactive dashboards that allow you to explore the dynamics, trends and data structure with the help of convenient and simple, but no less effective charts.

Like many other services, Tableau supports many different data sources organized in file format (CSV, JSON, XML, MS Excel, etc.), relational and non-relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, etc.) and cloud systems (AWS, Oracle Cloud, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure).

The key difference between Tableau and its competitors lies in its special function - data mixing - combining data from different databases and sources. Tableau also allows multiple users to work on a real-time report at the same time. Also, the platform implements several ways to share reports: 1) by publishing them on the Tableau server; 2) via e-mail Tableau Reader; 3) via link access. This diversity adds flexibility and removes many restrictions.

Distinctive features

Tableau has the widest visualization capabilities: the platform's rich library includes word clouds, bubble and tree charts that allow you to achieve a higher level of understanding of your data and its context.

As already mentioned, Tableau dashboards are extremely flexible. The main functions of the service allow you to place elements on the dashboard in an incredible way and combine and overlay them in any way, which is very useful in the era of workplace ergonomics.

Tableau is quite friendly for beginners, the platform is aimed at those who have not yet delved into technical details visualization process. This goal is achieved through an intuitive interface: everything you need is most often achieved in no more than 2 mouse clicks, filters are easy to find, and all operations are clearly documented.

Tableau is easy to work with, not only from the point of view of development and reporting, but also from the point of view of the end user - management. Additional filters, creation of new parameters, simple and understandable data interactivity - all this significantly speeds up decision making and makes them more efficient.

Key Features

• Excellent opportunities for distribution of reports and dashboards.
• Support for over 30 data types.
• Mixing data from different sources.
• Integration with R.
• The most active community of users who create thousands of educational videos, blogs and forums.

Ease of use

The amazing usability and ease of use is the main reason why Tableau is considered one of the easiest BI services to learn, and it performs best when analyzing structured information. Import data, build beautiful graphics, share it and publish it in the public domain - no other platform can provide users with such a wide range of possibilities with such simplicity. Moreover, a huge number of different manuals and guides practically nullifies the likelihood of encountering any difficulties.

Price

Tableau has 3 different products with 3 different pricing: Tableau Desktop, Tableau Online, and Tableau Server. Detailed information can be found.

Tableau Desktop is for individual users and costs $999 per person per year and $1,999 for corporate use including support. In the first case, it is supposed to connect up to 6 data sources, and in the second - up to 44.

Tableau Online is a web-based cloud platform that is free to use, but on the condition that all solutions are stored on a shared server and published to the public. The private version costs $500 per year per user.

Finally, Tableau Server is a monolithic business tool for companies that manage their servers and want to have full control over their data flows and security. However, such pleasure will cost $ 10,000 per year for 10 users, and support will cost an additional 25% of this amount.

Power BI

Power BI is an online service developed by Microsoft for business intelligence with the ability to connect various data sources and third-party applications. The platform has a web interface that allows you to create customized visualizations, and using a desktop application, you can standardize and clean data. Interestingly, there is also a mobile version of Power BI available on various operating systems to make decisions on the go.

Power BI is simple and minimalist, yet powerful and stable at the same time. Like any other software, it has both pros and cons.

Distinctive features

What makes Power BI different from other solutions?

Firstly, this is a Microsoft product, which means that it follows a philosophy, principles and architecture similar to other products of the IT giant. The interface of the program will be familiar to Windows users.

Secondly, belonging to Microsoft gives another advantage: Power BI is closely related to the main products of the company, such as MS Excel, Azure Cloud Service and SQL Server.

Generally speaking, Power BI was created to extend the functionality of MS Excel and pump it to a new level and use it to solve problems in which it was not previously involved.

Key Features

• There is a free basic version that allows you to try out Power BI first.
• Supports many ways to import data (streaming data, cloud services, Excel workbooks, and third-party applications).
• Interactive dashboards with real-time data changes.
• A simple API to integrate Power BI into your applications.
• There are several ways to share reports and dashboards.
• Multi-platform support (web, desktop or mobile app).

Ease of use

The interface is simple and will be understood by anyone familiar with Windows (that is, almost everyone), so working with Power BI is usually a pleasure. Many buttons and functions look similar to MS Excel and other MS Office products.

Visualizations are created in the good old drag-and-drop way. All you need to create any graph is to click on the required element and drag it to an empty spot in the report. The same principle works when choosing what data to visualize - just select a piece of data and place it on the place where the graph is located.

Price

Microsoft Power BI is considered a high-quality business intelligence tool, attracts many and is quite democratic price policy. It includes two options: a free version of the service with limited features and a volume license of Power BI Pro with a full range of features.

The free version is available to any individual user and has the following features: 1 GB memory limit, 10,000 rows/hour streaming data processing rate along with limits on updating and sharing reports.

Power BI Pro costs $9.99 per user per month and increases the memory limit to 10 GB per person along with a speed of 1M rows/hour. There is also the possibility of accessing data sources directly, linking them to these companies through the Data Connectivity Gateway. Finally, advanced collaboration tools become available, such as Office 365 Groups, Active Directory groups, and the Information Catalog.

Now, to structure everything that was said above, we give comparison table all considered platforms:

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business intelligence

business intelligence or abbreviated BI- business analysis, business analytics. This concept most often means software created to help a manager in analyzing information about his company and its environment. There are several ways to understand this term.

• Business analytics are methods and tools for building informative reports on the current situation. In this case, the purpose of business intelligence is to provide the right information to the right person who needs it at the right time. This information may be vital for making management decisions.
• Business intelligence is the tools used to transform, store, analyze, model, deliver, and trace information while working on evidence-based decision-making tasks. At the same time, with the help of these tools, decision makers should receive the right information at the right time using the right technologies.

Thus, BI in the first sense is only one of the business intelligence sectors in the broader second sense. In addition to reporting, it includes data integration and cleansing (ETL) tools, analytical data warehouses, and Data Mining tools.

BI technologies make it possible to analyze large amounts of information, focusing users' attention only on key performance factors, modeling the outcome various options actions, tracking the results of making certain decisions.

The history of the term

The term first appeared in a 1958 paper by IBM researcher Hans Peter Lun. Hans Peter Luhn). He defined the term as: "The ability to understand the connections between presented facts."

BI as we know it today evolved from decision-making systems that emerged in the early 1960s and were developed in the mid-1980s.

In 1989, Howard Dresner (later an analyst at Gartner) defined Business intelligence as general term describing "concepts and methods for improving business decision making using business data-driven systems".

Notes

Links

• Is Business Analytics replacing Business Intelligence? (j-l PC Week/RE No. 41 (599) November 6 - November 12, 2007)
• BI as a Marketing Campaign Optimization Tool (PC Week Review: Business Intelligence, May 2010)
• Business Intelligence: Today and Tomorrow (Intelligent Enterprise Magazine No. 2 (212), February 2010)
• Business Intelligence on Russian Soil (J-l PC Week Review: Business Intelligence, May 2010)

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010 .

See what "Business Intelligence" is in other dictionaries:

business intelligence- (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information and sometimes to the information itself. The purpose of business intelligence a term that dates at least… … Wikipedia

Business Intelligence 2.0- (BI 2.0) is a loose term referring to some new (2006 7) trends and advances in Business Intelligence (BI). The 2.0 version number alludes to version numbers assigned to software even though it is only an abstract concept not a specific… … Wikipedia

business intelligence- Der Begriff Business Intelligence (deutsch etwa betriebswirtschaftliche Erkundung oder Geschäftsaufklärung), Abk. BI, wurde Anfang bis Mitte der 1990er Jahre populär und bezeichnet Verfahren und Prozesse zur systematischen Analyze (Sammlung,… … Deutsch Wikipedia

business intelligence- Der Begriff Business Intelligence (engl. etwa Geschäftsanalytik Abk. BI) wurde Anfang bis Mitte der 1990er Jahre populär und bezeichnet Verfahren und Prozesse zur systematischen Analyse (Sammlung, Auswertung und Darstellung) von Daten in… … Deutsch Wikipedia

business intelligence- Informatique décisionnelle Pour les articles homonymes, voir DSS et BI. L’informatique décisionnelle (Management du système d information, en anglais: DSS pour Decision Support System ou encore BI pour Business Intelligence) désigne les… … Wikipédia en Français

business intelligence- noun Any information that pertains to the history, current status or future projections of a business organization … Wiktionary

business intelligence- / bɪznɪs ɪnˌtelɪdʒ(ə)ns/ noun information that may be useful to a business when it is planning its strategy … marketing dictionary in english

business intelligence- Sammelbegriff für den IT gestützten Zugriff auf Informationen, sowie die IT gestützte Analyze und Aufbereitung dieser Informationen. Ziel dieses Prozesses ist es, aus dem im Unternehmen vorhandenen Wissen, neues Wissen zu generieren. Bei diesem… … Lexikon der Economics

business intelligence tools- are a type of application software designed to report, analyze and present data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored often, though, not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart. Types of business intelligence tools Wikipedia

Business Intelligence Development Studio- (BIDS) is the IDE from Microsoft used for developing data analysis and Business Intelligence solutions utilizing the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Reporting Services and Integration Services. It is based on the Microsoft Visual Studio ... ... Wikipedia

Books

• business intelligence. Data Mining and Optimization for Decision Making , Carlo Vercellis , Business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better… Publisher:

At most enterprises, sales and production are still falling, credit resources are becoming more expensive, and consumption is decreasing. All this requires urgent changes in the company, and in particular, cost reduction. That is why, now the manager is required to use modern IT tools. One can even say that the use of modern analytical systems (Business Intelligence) is today one of the conditions for the company's survival.

Business Intelligence - Information Driven Management

Back in the eighties of the last century, the first analytical applications appeared that were intended to support decision making. These tools were very different from transactional accounting applications, which were primarily focused on operations. The amount of information that was generated through the use of such systems gave a serious impetus to the development of a new class of applications designed to support management decision-making. These systems have been called online analytical processing systems ( Online Analytical Processing, OLAP). Already in the early nineties, the Gartner Group introduced the term business intelligence, which is now widely used to refer to analytical applications.

« Business Intelligence (BI) has evolved into a strategic initiative and is now recognized by CIOs and business leaders as a means to improve enterprise performance and innovation,” said Andreas Bitterer, vice president of research at Gartner.
According to a survey conducted by this company, in which more than a thousand executives took part information services, business intelligence was recognized as a Technology Priority in 2008. At the same time, interest in business intelligence has been maintained for more than three years in a row. And only this year showed a change in the trend of interest in this topic, in 2009 business intelligence became the eighth in terms of priorities, and this is due to the fact that most foreign companies have already included this tool in their practice.

However, the Russian practice of using BI tools is still in its infancy, and for the next couple of years there is no need to worry about a decline in interest in these technologies. Indeed, despite the relatively high level existing automation Russian companies, the majority of general directors do not yet have a computer at their workplaces, and certainly do not make decisions based on the analysis of information from analytical systems. The ERP systems implemented in many companies made it possible to plan the company's resources and make it more transparent. But from this decision-making on highest level it has not become easier, and still the most important quality of a leader is intuition.

Oddly enough, but the main result of the past boom in the automation of Russian companies is the cost of millions of dollars, while strategic decisions are still made the old fashioned way. Many CEOs are now asking the question, "We've spent millions on automation, but why can't I see tangible results in my activities." In most cases, this is due to the fact that in many companies there is a CIO in charge of information technology, but there is no CIO. Indeed, now most companies have accumulated "oceans of information", and in order to process it and apply it to support decision-making, specialized technologies are needed -.

Practice shows that at present the volume of stored and analyzed information is growing at a tremendous speed in all industries, while some of them can be called clear leaders. Banks, insurance companies, telecommunications companies and retail the volume of processed data is calculated in terabytes, and the level of satisfaction of customer requirements depends on the correct use of this data, and therefore competitive advantages. Those who are the first to be able to convert the accumulated data into the information necessary for making informed decisions will be able to win the competition.

At the same time, along with the volume of information, the speed of its generation, as well as its diversity, is growing, which requires strategic approach to information management and implementation of BI tools. After all, choosing technologies for solving today's problems without taking into account future needs, you can face their unsuitability in a couple of years. Another difficulty for most companies is the low quality of data, and hence the lack of reliability of the information received. After all, if information is entered into the system once a month and from unreliable sources, then the decision made on the basis of such information is likely to be “posthumous”. In such a situation, it is impossible to work the old fashioned way; sooner or later, specialized tools for verifying and analyzing information will be needed.

That is why the analytical company Gartner has noted worldwide interest in analytical applications for several years, and the Russian market has seen a huge number of projects for the implementation of these tools. This is due to the fact that the implemented ERP systems do not yet have the return that everyone was counting on. And now only BI technologies make it possible to automate the collection and analysis of information, as well as its presentation in a form convenient for management.

The tasks of information analysis are so diverse that, in addition to industry specialization, BI tools have differences in the class of tasks they solve. At the same time, no matter how much you would like to solve all the problems with a single and universal BI tool, this is impossible. Currently, there are many different BI tools on the Russian market that cover certain needs of companies. However, buying a BI tool often does not give the expected results, because you need not only to buy a toolkit and deploy it in your company, but also devote a lot of time to the quality of existing data and ways to verify it. Unfortunately, many companies do not yet have that single version of the truth that is necessary for making a decision.

That is why, buying tools Business Intelligence (BI) will not lead the company to success. For the effective implementation of BI tools in a company, it is necessary to create the appropriate conditions, and first of all, this is the support of managers. After all, the users of these applications should be the first persons of the company, and if this is not the case, then the tools will most likely “gather dust on the shelf”. Breaking the habit of managing the old fashioned way is what needs to be done in a company, and it is not so easy.
In addition to changes in management, it is necessary to harmonize measures for the use of BI tools with the existing business strategy companies.

What and when to measure? On what indicators should strategic and tactical decisions be based? Who is responsible for specific indicators? Without answers to these questions, the implementation and development of BI tools can go the wrong way.

And of course, for the rapid and efficient deployment of business analysis technologies, it is necessary to determine the responsible employee and the corresponding center of competence, otherwise nothing will come of it. After all, in order to bring together all the needs of many functional customers and create an appropriate information infrastructure, it is necessary to constantly work and make many managerial decisions at the level of top managers. The strategy for using BI should run through the entire company and start from the processes of collecting primary data and ending with the processes of acceptance. strategic decisions, otherwise there will be no trust in the information received, which means that analytical information will not be used when making decisions.

Implementation of Business Intelligence

In fact, for the successful implementation of BI technologies in a company, it is necessary to create BIG team – Business Intelligence Governance, – i.e. center of competence for information management at the level of the entire company. The creation of such a center of competence for BI allows you to centralize the responsibility and competence for information management in the company, as well as to put things in order among the tools used by BI.

The BI Competence Center can have a standard structure that brings together business customers and employees whose area of ​​responsibility lies in the field of management information technology and information (CIO, information architect, business intelligence, etc.). At the same time, the following can be distinguished as the main tasks of the competence center: managing the needs of business customers, choosing information management technologies, methodological guidance, standardizing work and used technologies, accumulating competence, data quality management.

The ways of organizing such a center of competence can also be different:
Functional subdivision reporting to the IT subdivision;
The division responsible for operational management;
distributed structure with subordination to CEO;
a virtual organization.

The form of organization can be any, the main thing is that the company should have people responsible for information management and business analysis. According to Gartner, most often the BIG team is located in the IT department, which does not always allow you to give the necessary priorities to these works. After all, the creation of such a center of competence is primarily necessary to centralize responsibility for information management and the use of BI applications. Therefore, it is most effective if the competence center reports directly to the general director or his deputy. At the same time, the fundamental issue, from the point of view of the effectiveness of the created unit, is the assignment of appropriate powers to it. In practice, these structures exist in no more than one percent of Russian companies, which once again confirms the low maturity Russian management in the field of information management.

To understand the development strategy of this area, the first result of the work of the created competence center should be a strategy in the field of information management and the use of business analysis tools. Without such a systemic view, there is a strong possibility that business customers will use different BI tools with overlapping functionality, which in turn will increase costs and not achieve the expected benefits. Now it makes no sense to spend money without defining a clear development strategy, otherwise there will be a zoo of BI applications that will be unmanageable.

The current trends in the development of the BI applications market are in the growth of industry and functional specialization of BI platforms, as well as an increase in their number. Thus, a clear understanding of their needs and the choice of appropriate BI applications is necessary on the part of the company, and given the increase in the number of users of BI tools in the company, this is becoming more and more critical.

As already noted, the past wave of ERP system implementations in Russian companies has created a platform on the basis of which, using BI tools, you can and should select the information necessary for decision making. Therefore, with the deterioration of the internal situation, companies turned their attention to the issues of their internal organization and efficiency, and began to actively use BI applications, which used to be more of a toy for business analysts than a real tool.
One problem that now needs to be addressed when implementing BI tools is the quality of data in a company. Analyst company Gartner offers the following classification of data quality by levels: optimized, managed, proactive, reactive, knowledgeable. At the same time, the higher the quality of data in the company, the greater the benefit for the business, which in turn allows you to move from management based on intuition to management based on good feeling.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

The following are the advantages of using BI applications. First of all, Business Intelligence (BI) reduces the cost of information management, as it eliminates redundant data extraction processes and the existing duplication of information. BI systems save employees time due to more efficient processing of information, and the ability to analyze large amounts of data reduces the number of employees required to process information.

As business intelligence tools are deployed in a company, users begin to perform analysis and make predictions, and then the benefits of BI applications become even more noticeable. For example, application Business Intelligence (BI) at a strategic level can allow reaching new market, change the direction of the company or launch a new line of services.
From the point of view of the development of BI applications, the development trend of these systems is aimed at increasing specialization. There are already real-time business analysis systems Business Activity Monitor (BAM) that allow you to provide decision-making data that appeared a few minutes ago. These systems are of great help to the middle level of management, as they allow them to support the adoption of operational decisions. Also, business process analysis systems - Process Intelligence, which allow you to monitor and analyze (controlling) executable business processes, as well as analyze organizational effectiveness employees.

This intersection of business process management technologies (Business Process Management) and business intelligence systems (Business Intelligence) allows not only to see the problem, but also to find its cause, which in turn makes it possible to correct it before the consequences occur.
As a conclusion, it can be noted that the market for BI tools is growing, and serious acquisitions are taking place on it. Major players, such as SAP, Microsoft, Oracle buy the most promising BI technologies and integrate them into their solutions. And this is a clear sign of the demand for BI tools and an indicator that in the coming years the development of companies will go in this direction.

Andrey Koptelov, Magazine General Director

Analytical review: BI in Russia 2009

Analysts of the TAdviser center completed preparation of the open review of the market of the platforms for the business analysis (BI) presented in the Russian market. On this page you can read the most interesting sections of the review.

Benefits of using a BI system

Systems for business analysis solve a very wide range of tasks. Thus, the “near horizon” is monitoring, analysis and adjustment of operational goals:

support for the development of business processes and structural changes enterprises;

the possibility of modeling various business situations in a single information environment;

conducting operational analysis on non-standard requests;

reducing the routine workload on staff and freeing up time for deeper analytical work;

stable operation with an increase in the volume of processed information, the possibility of scaling.

In terms of supporting the strategic development of an enterprise, BI systems provide:

evaluation of the effectiveness of various business areas;

assessment of the feasibility of the goals set;

assessment of the efficiency of resource use, including by subsidiaries;

evaluation operating room efficiency, investment and financial activities;

business modeling and evaluation of investment projects;

cost management, tax planning, capital investment planning.

To date, according to experts from Gartner, only 15-20% of business users are actively working with BI applications, while the rest consider systems for business analysis too complicated to use. However, the active development of tools for interactive data visualization and the further spread of Internet technologies should soon improve the situation.

According to analysts from MiPro Consulting, the introduction of an independent BI system in an organization provides a number of advantages over using analytical tools embedded in other corporate information systems. Some of the benefits of a BI system include:

greater visibility and convenience of working with information for business users, including top management;

the possibility of using several analytical solutions for various areas of activity across the entire enterprise, and not within individual departments;

allows you to extract, analyze and consolidate data from virtually any source;

is based on an industrial, supported and developed BI platform;

has the status of an independent, strategic, business-critical application;

provides the necessary scalability, efficiency, performance;

allows you to build and maintain end-to-end procedures and processing processes throughout the organization, unified centralized analytical models and projects;

contains built-in tools to solve various and varied analytical tasks, both from a business and IT perspective;

provides access to data and analytical tools to more users.

The use of analytical tools built into other corporate information systems, for example, the ERP or CRM class, as a rule, has the following limitations:

a limited set of implemented analytical tools that are the same for all users, regardless of their roles and tasks;

the ability to use only your own, internal data for analysis, while information from other systems remains inaccessible, and data from various sources cannot be consolidated;

the lack of developed built-in tools for analysis leads to the fact that the system is used only to extract the data stored in it, which are then exported and analyzed in Excel;

ERP and CRM systems, as a rule, have a limited number of users, which “cuts off” a large number of company employees from analytics who would find this information useful and interesting (a significant increase in the number of users reduces the performance of transactional systems);

transactional systems usually do not contain all the indicators necessary for analysis, do not include tools such as dashboards, which have already become the standard for presenting analytical information;

the results of analysis in such systems are usually presented in the form of tabular reports or diagrams, which does not allow obtaining a detailed and comprehensive idea of ​​the real state of affairs and does not answer many questions that arise;

the ability to create flexible custom (ad-hoc) requests is limited;

the use of large volumes of accumulated historical information is limited.

When choosing or upgrading a system for business analysis, you should consider ways to store and integrate data, visualization and analytics tools.

Data storage

If a company is faced with the task of identifying long-term or periodic trends, that is, users need to analyze historical data coming from various departments over the past 3-5 years, then most likely they should think carefully about organizing ETL operations to load data into data warehouses.

If a company or any of its departments needs to analyze information on a monthly or weekly basis, then the best solution would be to allocate and organize for these purposes (for each of the departments or to solve specific tasks) individual data marts, also using ETL tools.

If the company plans to analyze operational data in a near real-time mode (that is, updated several times during the day), then it may be necessary to abandon the organization of the data warehouse and pay attention to the development of integration tools based on the intermediate virtual metadata layer with elaboration appropriate interfaces and algorithms (according to the EII principle).

Data integration

As noted above, if the purpose of implementing a BI system is to solve individual, specific tasks, then it is advisable to limit ourselves to organizing data marts. In this case, the use of any separate integration algorithms is not required.

If, on the contrary, BI is implemented with the aim of obtaining a single, holistic view of general state business, then it is probably impossible to do without creating a centralized data warehouse and, accordingly, implementing the necessary ETL tools. In addition, in order to obtain a truly adequate picture of the business, it is necessary to pay special attention to ensuring the high quality of the analyzed data, and this will require the introduction of an expanded set of tools for their "cleaning" - identifying incomplete or erroneous data, duplicate information, bringing data from various sources to a single format.

If the company focuses on the study of operational data, then you should consider means of replication and access.

Visualization and analytics

Depending on the tasks set, as well as on the qualifications of users, data visualization tools are also selected - control panels, scorecards, reports, OLAP cubes.

For experienced, qualified users, OLAP cubes will be the best tool, which will allow them to conduct deep and detailed business analysis, with the required degree of detail.

Users who in their daily activities are faced with the need to make managerial decisions, as well as analyze business performance, are interested in organizing a workplace in the form of a control panel, which displays the state of the business as a whole in the form of visual scales and indicators, with the ability to switch between individual areas activities.

Ordinary managers need funds to solve their current tasks, control the progress of certain types operations, as well as to control the activities of their employees (each individual employee and the team as a whole). In addition, in order to organize clear interaction with related departments (or regions), it is necessary to be able to get an idea of ​​the progress of the implementation of interrelated tasks.

Vertical or horizontal solution

There are both horizontal BI solutions on the market that implement a set of generally applicable tools, as well as specialized vertical solutions “tailored” for specific industries or tasks. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of horizontal solutions can be seen as their ability to grow with the organization. Such solutions are usually scalable and can cover all lines of business and all departments. big company and are also easier to change. The downside of this breadth of possibilities is the need for a longer and more thorough customization of solutions, adaptation to specific requirements. Implementation projects are becoming more costly and the demands on IT professionals are becoming higher.

Vertical solutions, for their part, do not require separate lengthy and time-consuming configuration to solve specific problems and to comply with the requirements of industry regulatory organizations (financial, medical, etc.). However, it may turn out that different departments within the same structure will not be able to use a single solution, and it may be necessary to master and integrate several different systems for business analysis.

Those organizations that now and in the future plan to engage in their specific activities that require compliance with certain strict regulations are likely to benefit from the implementation of vertical solutions. If there is no confidence in such a commitment to a certain type of activity in the future, and it is likely that the company's specialization will expand significantly, then choosing a vertical BI solution is a certain risk.