So you’ve decided it’s time to implement a business intelligence (BI) system in your organization, but you’re suddenly faced with an intimidating variety of options. There are the older, well-established BI vendors and the newer entrants. There are multi-vendor data warehouse/BI solutions and one-stop-shop packages. There are the on-premises solutions as well as the cloud solutions. And of course they all claim to be powerful, flexible, easy to use and affordable.

Hopefully, this article will help you sort through some of the most important issues in making a BI software selection.

Cost

In almost every situation, the cost of the BI system will be a major factor, and will probably limit your search to particular segments of the market. The single most important aspect of cost, however, is to make sure you understand the true total cost of ownership (TCO) of the solutions you are considering. In typical BI implementations, the cost of the software is actually a small fraction of what you will need to pay. This is because most BI solutions will require expensive integration and report creation services. The cost of these consulting services almost always eclipse the software licensing fees. Furthermore, the services required to maintain the reports and analytic applications (e.g., modifying and extending them to meet the ever-changing needs of the business users) and create new ones must also be taken into consideration. You can assume that you will always need more of these services than you expect.

Note that selecting a cloud-hosted BI solution doesn’t alter this equation. Cloud BI is just like typical business intelligence in terms of the types of data integration and report creation/maintenance you will need. The lack of large up-front hardware and software investments in cloud BI can be attractive initially, but since the service fees will dramatically exceed the hardware and software costs of anyway, this should be kept in perspective. Furthermore, the serious hardware horsepower (namely, CPU and RAM) that enterprise-scale BI applications demand end up being far more expensive over time than actually buying the hardware yourself.

Startup Time

Many BI projects are so complex and take so much time to get off the ground that, in the end, they never launch at all. It is obvious that the shorter the timeframe involved to go from BI package selection to actual use in the organization, the greater the chances that the investment will deliver a positive ROI to the business.

One of the best ways to cut through the BI marketing hype is to ascertain, in advance of your selection, how long it will take to get the BI solution up and running in your organization. Take into consideration purchasing and installing hardware and software, data integration, data preparation and report/dashboard creation. Ask the BI vendor how long it typically takes to go from project start to launch – if it looks like weeks (or months) of work will be required before your users will be able to run a single report on your actual data, look elsewhere. If the vendor can’t commit to getting at least one solid report or dashboard running over your own actual data before you even commit to purchasing the system from them, it’s probably because they would have to spend weeks or months on development before they can reach that point. Because there are now BI solutions that can accomplish this in days (sometimes in hours), you know that solutions requiring longer development projects just to get started are probably using old technology. You can do better.

Data Integration and Preparation

One of the keys to a successful BI implementation is how the corporate data stores are integrated with the BI solution and how the data is prepared for analytical use. Typically, Business Intelligence software solutions require the presence of a "data warehouse," a centralized database filled with all the business’s data. Do not underestimate the expense and difficulty of creating an effective data warehouse for those BI solutions which require one! Historically speaking, data warehouse design and implementation usually generate lots of income for integrators, but are the source of great angst for their customers. If you keep in mind that there are excellent enterprise BI solutions available that allow you to completely sidestep these issues, you will be doing a lot towards reaching a successful BI selection!

Another element involved in the preparation of data for use by many BI systems is OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). This technology is more than two decades old and was designed to improve BI query performance over large datasets. Like the data warehouse behind it, OLAP is very lengthy and costly to implement. Most importantly, there is really no need for it anymore. Modern BI technology can process massive amounts of data without OLAP, at a fraction of the time, complexity and cost. If OLAP is recommended or required by any BI solution you are considering, you should probably take it off your list.

Self-Service Report, Dashboard and Analytic Application Creation

A major dividing line in the BI field is between those BI solutions which require experts (e.g., integration firms, professional services contractors) to create and modify reports, dashboard and analytic applications and those solutions which allow regular business users to do this themselves. Since BI needs are constantly changing, this is a huge issue.

The advantages of conventional BI systems, namely those maintained by dedicated (or outsourced) IT staff, is that the full power of the BI technology is always available. Because the IT professionals are proficient in every aspect of the software, they can create almost any conceivable report or application. Furthermore, when end users don’t have to spend the time learning the software and then maintaining their own reports, they have more time to spend on their primary job functions.

On the other hand, by selecting a BI solution that allows any Excel-savvy business user to create (or at least modify/customize) reports, dashboards, queries and analytics applications him/herself, you have eliminated the greatest bottleneck (and expense) in the world of BI. The time, cost and miscommunication involved in depending on outside experts to create and modify BI applications almost ensures that your business users will be frustrated as they try to get the system to continue meeting their needs. The greatest competitive advantage of BI is generated when business users can get any answer or run any analysis whenever they want.

This decision is clearly an important one, and BI buyers have to decide how much IT dependence they can tolerate versus how important it is for end users to be able to create and maintain their own reports and dashboards.

User Interface

A slick user interface is appealing and BI vendors love to sell themselves with their advanced reporting and dashboard screens. While the graphical visualization of data is important, of course, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to judge a BI solution based on the fancy sample dashboards and reports the vendor shows you. The truth is that graphical visualization software components are commonplace and easy to develop or implement from any number of software vendors. The real challenge is to quickly create and customizing reports and dashboards to your own needs. If the BI solution you’re looking at can’t show you full-fledged reports and dashboards over your own data within just a few days, you should probably look elsewhere.

Technology

The most mature BI technologies in the market are based on OLAP, described earlier in this article. While it served its purpose well for many years, the costs, compromises and inefficiencies involved with OLAP really make it a poor choice when seeking a new BI solution in the twenty-first century.

A newer technology which has been getting a lot of attention in the past few years is called in-memory BI, or in-memory database (IMDB). IMDBs offer an alternative to resource-intensive data warehouse and OLAP projects. An IMDB is a database management system designed to provide very high performance so long as sufficient memory (RAM) is available to hold the entire data set being processed. Contrast this with conventional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMs), which rely instead on much-slower disk-based media. While IMDBs have become popular during recent years due to the large addressable memory spaces made possible by now-ubiquitous 64-bit business computers and operating systems, they still present a hard ceiling when dealing with large datasets.

Unlike hard disk-based database solutions, for which it is easy to continuously add more storage at low cost, memory-based solutions require more and more relatively expensive memory to grow. While 64-bit PCs theoretically provide a very high maximum memory threshold, in practicality, deploying the required volumes of memory becomes prohibitive. This is because, with the in-memory approach, the entire data set must be loaded into memory at once. When the size of the data (even after compression) exceeds the amount of RAM, in-memory BI solutions become unusable. Companies with rapidly-growing data volumes will find that in-memory solutions will soon reach limits which make them impractical. This becomes substantially more obvious when there are multiple users accessing the same in-memory store.

A more advanced technology called ElastiCube has been developed by BI software company, SiSense. ElastiCube as is as fast as in-memory databases, but far more scalable. Also, it provides powerful OLAP-like functionality and scalable ad-hoc analytics, without the hefty projects and without compromising on the rapid implementation and fast query response times characterized by in-memory solutions.

Conclusion

It is clear that there are some complex issues involved in selecting the ideal BI solution for your organization. Perhaps more than in other fields of software, it behooves you to carefully investigate the many dimensions involved in making this selection. With this awareness, you will be better equipped to evaluate both the conventional BI systems available and the newer solutions, based on more updated technologies. One of the latter solutions is from SiSense, a company that has developed a BI software which provides speed, scalability, low monthly pricing and easy-to-use self-service features. A free 30-day test drive of the software is available at SiSense's website