The BI market has changed quite a lot in the past few years as IT companies have learnt to adopt BI tools depending on their current business practices. Although the IT industry has led the charge in developing modern BI and analytics platform, they continue to face challenges in the integration of huge amounts of siloed data. At an enterprise level, there is clearly a shift of focus from IT-led reporting to business-led self-service analytics.
Technology vendors today working in tandem with customers need to understand what their business requirements are and how they can use data to strengthen their business intelligence journey. Analytical and technical tools can unlock the strategic importance of data, but that does not mean intelligent business processes are easy to come by. Coordination between operational teams and IT department is one of the key requirements in bringing BI tools for detailed analysis and reporting of data. In today’s digital world, data scientists need to plan, architect and implement the enterprise data warehouse with powerful, intelligent business analytics.
According to PwC, Artificial intelligence will be available for mass adoption in the domains of data science (9.6%) and business intelligence (7.8%) in industries and organizations. Organizations that have thought systematically about using Business Intelligence (BI) software are often at an advantage that SMEs that lack the option of custom BI. SMEs usually opt neither for open source solutions that are nor as user friendly as custom dashboard BI systems. And the limitations of open source systems can negatively affect business performance and expose them to security and compliance risks.
In a global marketplace where business lack the infrastructure support to build custom business intelligence dashboard software, open source solutions can fail to identify underlying data and information needs of an organization. Many open source business intelligence tools come with their own complications about how to deal with deployment and maintenance. However custom software companies have grown tremendously across the industry to take on the mantle of business reporting. They include features such as real-time reporting, drag-and-drop user interfaces, scorecards, visualizations or collaboration tools, which make the task a lot easier. Free software can be cheaper but are probably best when you are making a small investment to get to know the world of business intelligence.