How BI Is So Much More Than Just A Reporting Tool

One of the oldest and most misguided thoughts about business intelligence is that it is a glorified tool for analytics reporting. How many times have we heard the annoying question, "oh, why don't you just use Excel for that?"

Not to discredit the powerful potential of Excel, but it's just not even remotely the same.

Those of us in the BI industry have made our case and know that there is so much more to BI than just reporting in a "sexy" way. We've almost made it our part-time job to correct every aspect of this misconception and show the whole value of a well-done BI implementation.

This article should begin to help you combat the generalizations where BI has simply been demoted to a "reporting tool." The points outlined below will demonstrate how BI goes beyond one category and makes deep changes in any organization, providing a continuous improvement tool that boosts data quality, maximizes the potential of your ERP source and drives informational self-sufficiency.

#1. Prioritize and Improve Data Quality

After almost any BI implementation, organizations quickly realize that their new BI analytics scarcely match their old ones. It's nearly impossible to avoid given the complexities of some source systems. Then they open their dashboards and discover that data quality is a real issue when the nice dashboards they were expecting don't look as glamorous or useful.

This suggests that people usually do tons of extra work in exporting the information from the source systems due to the bad data quality. This won´t allow them to generate the analysis they need and most of the time they're forced to manually clean/transform/homologate/integrate/complement data. I'm sure many of you have been in this ...