Before investing in BI tools, it’s important to think about what answers you’re looking for. “Implementing BI takes the desire to answer a question, not fancy software…[Implementing] a BI system without knowing the questions you want answers to is a prime example of BS [or business stupidity],” quipped David van Toor, principal with Irvine, California-based No Plan B.
Forget about using BI software if you don’t have access to quality operational data. “There has to be enough data available so it can't be readily understood without assistance. There's no point in implementing a BI if the data volumes are so small a person can look at the data and reach accurate conclusions,” states Paul Massie, senior director of operations and IT for YouSendIt.
Excel isn’t your only option. “Excel is often the default and de facto BI tool in many SMBs - simply because it's there, it's familiar and has a lot of basic function to allow users to play with data. A newer class of BI tools with more analytical and visualization function and the ability to handle larger data sets, such as QlikView, Tableau and Lyza, has been gaining traction recently,” writes Barry Devlin, founder and principal with 9sight Consulting in Cape Town, South Africa. As another option, BI Leader Consulting’s Wayne Eckerson says Microsoft PowerPivot is “like Excel on steroids.”
BI is increasingly going mobile. “For some SMBs, this might be a more prevalent and practical platform than traditional desktop or laptop computers. If the workforce is mobile or certain parts are mobile, then the SMB needs to make sure the BI vendor includes mobility at no extra cost with no extra setup,” says Eckerson.
I also heard from SMBs are using BI tools today.
"Using Pentaho and our data warehouse we can break down a metric and do specific analysis to identify under-performing partners in just 20 minutes. In the past the same query would take all night using an Excel grid," says Greg Allen, business analyst at the micro-lending site Kiva.org.
“The most powerful tool in our arsenal for BI and reporting…would have to be [SAP] Crystal Reports. They use a customer relationship management program that is based on MS-SQL. [Along with] some occasional SQL programming [it] allows us to fold, spindle and mutilate the data in nearly any way possible,” says Eric Horbinski, IT Director at Rapport Leadership International in Las Vegas.
Bob Shirilla created Keepsakes-etc.com and Simply-bags.com about five years ago after working for 20 years at a Fortune 200 IT company that used high-quality data mining and statistical analysis programs. “[My e-commerce sites] are doing very well in a very competitive product space. I attribute their success to the business decisions made by using the Google Analytical tools,” he says, referring to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Webmaster Tools.
BI Leader Consulting’s Eckerson says there are BI packages focused on specific applications that are commonly used by SMBs, such as JDEdwards, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics and Intuit QuickBooks. “There are also industry packages. Just make sure the package doesn’t lock you in to one way of looking at your data and makes it easy to export the data into a data warehouse so when you want to integrate all your data down the road you can do it,” he say, adding that since there are so many BI solutions on the market SMBs at a loss for how to begin using one might do well to get help from an expert.
Have you used a BI tool for your business? Let me know in the comments how it worked for you.
