Top Business Intelligence Features to Examine

Business intelligence (BI) software is a broad category of applications and tools that business use to gather, store, analyze, and access data, all with the goal of making better business decisions rooted in facts. Even though BI has proven its use to CIOs, day-to-day users in the trenches aren't always convinced -- and the BI tools themselves have often been difficult to use. According to Gartner, only 28 percent of enterprise users are actually using their company's BI tools. When determining which BI software to deploy in your enterprise, consider the features that will help increase widespread user adoption as well as access, and create, a range of useful data from across the enterprise.

To get users on board, CIOs need to demonstrate the value of BI, says James Richardson, an analyst with independent research firm Gartner. He suggests companies take a phased approach when introducing a BI strategy and consider choosing tools that have visual appeal to users. This is particularly important when you consider that everyday knowledge workers, instead of just business analysts, are going to need more and more access to BI.

In fact, Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel expects knowledge workers to create their own BI environments with cloud services and independently adopt new BI technologies, such as Microsoft's PowerPivot for Excel, which lets users create their own analysis tools on top of Excel.

Features that help increase user adoption include user-friendly interfaces that feel like the consumer application interfaces users are accustomed to from Web-based services. Also, look for interactive visualization tools that are easy to use, like Microsoft's PowerPivot. and that make data easier to access by users who aren't BI's traditional statistician types.

As a greater number of users in your organization need access to BI analyses, BI applications need to deliver more kinds of data and reports to meet their needs as well as make them more easily accessible. Gartner notes in its 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms report that there has been a shift in the last year from the measurement of data to analysis, forecasting, and optimization as companies need their BI applications to deliver more accurate forecasts, help optimize business processes, and identify leading and lagging business indicators. To that end, more BI vendors have introduced capabilities to make statistics, predictive analytic models, and forecasting algorithms more consumable in reports, dashboards, and analytic applications. Gartner goes on to say, "We see an increasing demand for tools that enable easier and more intuitive analysis to discover new insights." 

Basic BI Features and Advanced Technologies

Gartner has identified three categories of functionality for BI tools: integration, information delivery, and analysis. In the last year, vendors, especially those that are still incorporating acquired products into their BI portfolio, have worked to improve integration between BI platform components.

At the research firm's Business Intelligence Summit 2010, convened in April, Gartner advised CIOs to stay on top of nine emerging BI technologies. They are:

• In-memory analytics
• Cloud-based services
• Columnar databases
• Interactive visualization reports
• Integrated search
• Mobile BI applications
• Scenario modeling
• Data mashups
• Analytical master data management

If the BI continues to grow as it did last year -- Gartner recently reported a 4.2 increase from 2008 and a revenue of $8.9 billion -- chances are good your organization soon will be looking for BI features that make BI more accessible to all users. These emerging technologies aim to make that goal a reality.