Gathering Business Intelligence Requirements plays a key role in every BI project’s success. If executed properly, it can give your business tons of benefits. If not done well, then it can be a nightmare, dragging on for months. Here are the key business intelligence requirements specification one must keep in mind, when embarking on a BI project.
Key Business Intelligence Requirements for Every Business
Here’s a business intelligence requirements analysis for every BI project. Prepare a simple business intelligence requirements questionnaire with respect to the following business intelligence requirements template, to ensure a hassle-free project execution.
1. Data Sources & Platforms
After you have defined the scope of your BI project, ensure that your business intelligence software supports all the key data sources used by your organization/departments. Otherwise, you will end up wasting a lot of time setting up data transformations at your end. Similarly check if the BI software runs properly on your business’ platform (e.g Ubuntu, Windows Server, etc)
2. Data Visualizations
Examine all the charts & graphs supported by your BI data visualization tool. What customization does it support? Are there any specific visualizations such as maps, gauges, etc required by your team? If so, are they supported by your BI tool?
Also, determine if those data visualizations are interactive and user-friendly, so that your team has a good user experience.
Here’s a sample business dashboard built using Ubiq that uses various data visualizations.
3. Adhoc Analytics
Does your Business Intelligence platform allow users to explore and support ad-hoc reporting? Analytics allows users to easily report key business metrics such as profits, marketing KPIs and more, with just a few clicks. Although your team may have created a list of metrics to be tracked, this list will only grow over time, and even the existing metrics & KPIs are bound to change. So your BI software must be able to adapt easily and help build all types of business dashboards. This is one of the most important business intelligence requirements.
4. OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)
Online Analytical Processing features allow users to filter data on the fly, drill-down into reports and explore data on their own. It supports multi-dimensional data analysis and helps understand multi-layer data models, in minutes. This helps you discover new trends and uncover hidden patterns.
5. Email Reports
BI platforms are most effective when used by a team of people, instead of just a couple of users. These users may not be able to log into your BI software to see the latest dashboards & reports. So your BI dashboard tool must be able to send automated email reports daily/weekly to different users, as per their convenience. Automated report generation & distribution is one of the important business intelligence requirements, that will simplify your life a lot.
6. Integrations
If your business uses other data processing systems, then look for possible integrations with your BI tool. This will ensure that your BI tool speaks well with other tools in your organizations, and one tool’s output can be directly fed into another software.
7. Deployment
There are various ways to deploy a business intelligence software – on-premise, cloud, hosted installation and even mobile-based. Every organization has their deployment requirements based on their IT and security policies. So make sure your BI tool is compliant with your deployment requirements.
8. Mobile Ready
Almost every business user relies heavily on their mobile phones to do their work and access information. So it’s essential that your BI tool works well on iOS & Android devices. At the minimum, it should allow users to view their business dashboards and reports while on the move. Most online reporting tools are mobile-ready.
If you want to create business dashboards, reports & charts, you can try Ubiq. We offer a 14-day free trial!
Sreeram Sreenivasan is the Founder of Ubiq. He has helped many Fortune 500 companies in the areas of BI & software development.