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Viewpoint: are BI tools really intelligent?

By Nikhilesh Kumar Tiwari, founder of Helical IT Solutions.
Johannesburg, 31 Aug 2015
Most BI software is more or less generic in nature, says Nikhilesh Kumar Tiwari, founder of Helical IT Solutions.
Most BI software is more or less generic in nature, says Nikhilesh Kumar Tiwari, founder of Helical IT Solutions.

According to a blog in Forrester in 2010, a typical business intelligence (BI) tool costs about $150 000 and extract, transform, and load (ETL) costs about the same. Services, hardware and implementation generally scale up to five times the software cost.

Hence after investing more than a million dollars, most businesses realise the solution they have purchased is not really future-ready. As the business expands, the number of users increases, data grows, databases change, more software is incorporated and new technology adopted, and the BI solution is unable to incorporate future expectations. Of course, most BI software is more or less generic in nature with features such as report, dashboard, adhoc, cache, security, etc.

What all of these tools lack is future-ready architecture. This either results in business needs being compromised or dropped, or use of best of breed solutions or development of their own solution or outsourcing. The result is a waste of money and time - a search for a new BI tool, technical resources, implementation of the solution or usage of a best-of-breed solution.

If you are able to connect with this situation, you may need to relook your BI tool or BI implementation. Why should a business user adjust his requirements when ideally, it should be the other way around?

Also the expectations from a BI tool keep on increasing and since generally the tools are unable to live up to the growing expectations, they expire. This throws up an important question: are BI tools really intelligent?

An ideal case would be to have a BI tool which is future-ready and developer friendly: thus, it's flexible and extensible. With growing and ever-changing business requirements, IT staff will then be able to accommodate the advanced requirements by adding features, adopt new technology and justify the investment made.

Such a BI framework will not be bound by any tool or technology limitation and can adapt to any sort of requirement - current or future. It will be a developer's paradise, with the freedom to do or create anything, and business users' dream since whatever they seek can be achieved without compromises. This will also remove dependence on the BI vendor for any additional functionality or patches/releases based on their product roadmap, since the client's own team can add functionality.

Mentioned below are some of the instances where such a need is felt:

Can I add new data type as source?

Most BI tools support commonly used data sources, which are limited in number. If any new database type is to be added as a data source, it may not be possible without the database vendor providing the connection. Also, if the data storage technology is different like Hadoop, the client relies on the BI vendor to come up with a new patch or version. For BI vendors who have shifted their focus from product innovation to sales, such requests generally take a lot of time to execute. Wouldn't it be great if the developer himself was able to add data sources, API, etc, and enhance the tool?

There's a new API in the market. Can I fetch data from there?

BI tools generally come with native connectors to certain popular APIs. But, with changing times and requirements, new and more relevant application programming interfaces (APIs) come up. Fetching data from other APIs than the pre-installed ones may be impossible or often difficult. In such a scenario, one may feel the BI tools available today are not future ready.

Charting options are few, limiting my advanced and analytics usage

Nikhilesh Kumar Tiwari is 29 years old and runs his own enterprise in the data warehousing and business intelligence company, Helical IT Solutions.

After connecting to database, reports/dashboard are created. Most of the BI tools come with out-of-the-box charting options which are limited and may not fulfil requirements. Though some BI tools do allow external integration of charts, they often forgo other functionalities such as exporting, e-mail scheduling etc.

These limited charting options affect companies/people who are looking for advanced functionalities and might be working on predictive analytics and trend analytics - like data scientists and statisticians who are looking for statistical and advanced charting. A BI tool should allow charts to be integrated inside the report, dashboard, adhoc, etc, with ability to define inter-panel communication, input filters, etc. Also, even if integration of charts is external, other functionalities such as e-mailing, exporting, trigger, etc, should work.

Reports dashboards are stereotyped

Not only the plain vanilla reports and dashboards, a BI tool should be future-ready enough for other visualisation options like infographic, what-if analysis, mash-up, cubes, scorecards or any other type which exists or might come up in future

BI software user interface looks so alien

Often, companies have their own products/software with certain navigation options, icons and colour, adhering to a chosen theme. With BI also being introduced to their solution stack, wouldn't it be wonderful if the BI tool can be customised to match the design template of their existing solution stack, ie an option to change navigation way, repository access, icons, content menu, colour, text, theme, file extensions, etc of the BI software as well? Such exhaustive white-labelling capabilities can lead to a unified view of all the enterprise applications leading to ease of branding, usage and viewing.

Currently, what most BI tools offer in the name of white labelling is a change in the header and footer design, colour and text and other limited options.

There are so many tools

Many of the BI tools come with a number of separate software/hardware to be used like the server, designer tool, plug-ins, community plug-ins, etc. BI companies release enhancements within these, which at times, lead to compatibility issues. Here's food for thought: What if using the browser itself, we are able to execute everything exactly as the way the BI solution is being accessed? Imagine, no more downloading heavy software, no more compatibility issues, separate purchase of tools, etc.

BI vendor engagement never seems to end

Licensing is a complex issue. Licensing may be core-based or user-based or server-based or mix-matched or data size-based. Also there generally are separate licences for separate tools like designer, server, plug-in, etc. Sluggish performance of the solution leads to increase in core server, and hence the licences. Maintenance cost, development cost and renewal cost are top-ups. Prices are not benchmarked and in many cases, pricing is not crystal clear and often depends on the salesperson and the bargain being struck.

Adhoc capabilities not very capable

Adhoc capabilities allow business users to drag, drop and create their own reports and dashboards. Many BI tools are extremely limited here, not allowing or extending features to write custom scripts, add html, add visualisation for adhoc, add custom calculated columns, etc.

Can I extend core functionality altogether?

All BI tools fail miserably in their ability to extend core functionality. BI tools are designed with adoption of the approach that 'one-size-fits-all' wherein they are selling only their out-of-the-box features.

However, every client has a unique requirement. The ability to extend functionality and add features is something that could change the way people view and use BI. Examples of extending functionality could be things like outlook plug-in of BI, offline viewing, introducing new exporting options, rule-based system, custom alerting notifications and triggers, custom business processes etc. This could lead to a paradigm shift in the entire scope of BI

Sequence of events: Wish I could define the flow

An integrated workflow inside a BI tool could help in defining business processes and thus enhance capabilities. Examples of workflow could be things like 'run ETL and create report and mail to one set of users when value is between 0-50%, and send it to other set of users when value is greater than 50%'.

So much software, so many screens

Companies generally use a lot of software, thus clients have to navigate through them based on their requirements. Right now, we can only integrate BI charts inside other applications. It would add real value if the BI tool was flexible enough to allow the integration of other software inside the tool, to interact with that software as well, and for the BI to directly invoke their functions as well.

I just can't find the BI resource

Obtaining skilled resources is one of the problems in the BI domain. People with skilled resources are scarce and the salary they command is high, leading to outsourcing of projects. Why should there be a separate set of resources for BI at all? Why can't BI tools be simple enough for a HTML/Java resource to also be able to work on the tool?

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