| | MAY 20189CIOReviewto support advantageous features such as time series zooming, condition formatting, and OLAP analysis.A BI system is not just limited to new data and information. It can include your company's historical data, usually in the form of a data warehouse. This facilitates current, historical, and predictive views of your business operations. "What-if" analysis, used to predict the results of business decisions, is another key feature in quality BI system that you can put to use. A quality BI system can connect to multiple sources of data (new and historical) to provide seamless access to the data you need to run necessary analytics.It's one thing to invest in a Business Intelligence system, but like any tool you need to make smart use of it if you truly want to use it to your advantage. One of the first keys is to standardize your BI system on one fully capable platform. That means that you do not deploy several BI systems under the mistaken assumption that certain departments need a different type of BI. Standardizing the BI system makes handling data and report generation far more efficient and cost-effective.Another key to truly using BI to your advantage lies in your data. You need clean data sources, which means data that does not contain errors and inconsistencies such as misspellings, invalid entries, or missing information. If your data is dirty, then your results are going to be unreliable, much like the old adage "garbage in, garbage out." There are methods of cleansing your data to make sure you are working with the best quality data sources. The most expensive, feature-filled BI system cannot help you compete if all you give it is poor quality data to work with.An effective BI system will be equally accessible from a desk in the home office as from a tablet across the country. That means whatever BI system you choose must have a web and mobile interface. This allows you and your team to have seamless access to information from wherever you may be and whenever you need it. This gives you an edge over the competition as you can quickly respond to new trends, stop impending disasters, and make decisions quickly.When it comes to ease of use, one dashboard is not going to work for everyone that needs access to the system and the data it contains. You need a BI system that allows your end-users to be able to establish and control their own personalized dashboards with ease. End-users should also be able to take ownership of the system. That means that while your IT department can assist, IT should not be in charge of owning the data. This makes it that much easier for your employees to make effective use of the suite of tools at their disposal.When choosing a BI system, make sure that it can connect to multiple data sources. Data can be contained in flat files, databases, or web services, just to name a few types of sources. Even data from the same type of source may be arranged using a different type of architecture. To make the most of the data you have, both current and historical, you want a BI system that is able to work with many different types of data.A quality BI system will provide you access anytime, anywhere to the information your company needs to make critical decisions. It offers powerful analysis and visualization tools, so your end-users can make informed, intelligent choices that will help your business rise to the top. Once you have a standardized BI system working with clean data, you can produce reports and visualizations to give you the edge that you need. Your employees will have access to customized dashboards that will enable them to easily track changes and trends. The information harnessed by the BI system will reveal game-changing aspects of your business, its procedures, and its clients­and even the competition. Business Intelligence is no longer an option if your company wants to remain competitive, agile, and profitable. Daniel M. Horton
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