Features of Great BI Solutions

Most business leaders understand the value of business intelligence (BI). BI solutions can help people make better decisions, provide customer insights, improve operations, and help you identify trends. With new solutions that combine business intelligence and AI, it multiplies the power of BI teams and makes the power of BI more accessible.

With that said, your experience can differ depending on the BI software you choose. One of the key factors to consider is the features included with different BI solutions. In this post, we will cover some of the top features to look for when selecting a BI solution.

Self-Service Business Intelligence

 With traditional business intelligence systems, everything has to go through the organization’s BI and IT teams. Users would have to make requests to the BI team and then wait for results. Depending on the request, this could take days or weeks. 

Self-service BI offers business analytics software that is accessible to people without the technical background of a BI professional. With this type of software, regular users can run functions like statistical analysis, create reports, and ask questions of the data through a convenient user interface.

Data Integrations

A modern BI platform should be able to work with data from a vast array of sources. Along with collecting data from your internal data storage, it should be able to connect with things like your CRM, inventory management software, accounting software, social media data, website data, and more. Many of the more advanced BI solutions can even deploy machine learning to extract data from unstructured sources like text documents and images.

Custom Dashboards

Dashboards play an important role in BI software. A good dashboard provides users with a convenient overview of the most important information. It can display different key metrics and it might include features like charts and graphs. What makes this even more powerful is that the BI team can create custom dashboards to meet the needs of different users. Some BI tools even allow regular users to create their own dashboards using a drag-and-drop system.

AI-Driven Personalized Reporting Features

The reporting features are an important consideration when selecting a BI platform. With traditional BI tools, you had to rely on professionals to create reports. With newer BI solutions, the software can use AI to generate reports automatically. 

Check out the reporting features to see if you can get scheduled reports and if it can create reports on-demand. You should also find out the options for creating data visualizations. A good BI solution can also track key metrics in real-time and send notifications to alert team members of new trends or anomalies.

Analytics Features

With business intelligence and AI, you should also have access to a range of analytics options. Your business analytics software should cover descriptive analytics to provide answers about past events and it should deploy predictive analytics to provide forecasting features to decision-makers. 

The best BI solutions can also use machine learning to provide automated insights. With automated insights, the AI finds answers to questions you might not even think to ask. In this case, it identifies a trend in the data or it learns from experience to identify issues that may be relevant to your business operations.

Business Intelligence-as-a-service

This model will deliver all the benefits of a full-fledged, end-to-end BI solution, but with the ease and simplicity of a cloud deployment.

Using BI-as-a-Service, organizations can have experts seamlessly extract data from multiple sources, organize and analyze the growing volume of data, and present insights to users using intuitive dashboards and reports. The end-to-end service will not only enable them to overcome bottlenecks around their small number of data scientists, but it will also allow everyday users to create reports and dashboards on their own.

Mobile Support

Business intelligence users often find that they need to make decisions or access info when they are away from the office. With mobile support, users can access the core features of the BI software from a phone or tablet. The main considerations for mobile BI users are OS support and the features that can be accessed from the mobile app.

Modern BI solutions have so much to offer. Along with enhancing the efforts of BI teams, they make data and analytics much more accessible to users across an organization. 

With Crux Intelligence, you have one of the most powerful BI platforms available for modern businesses. Contact our support team to learn more about Crux Intelligence or to request a demo.