As businesses undergo rapid transition, the business intelligence (BI) technologies must evolve to match that pace. A few years ago, scalability, security, backup and restore, user management etc. were the features that defined a proficient BI product, but not anymore. BI has grown much beyond ETL, load balancing and dashboards. With integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, the modern enterprise BI
Has become way more agile, faster and cutting edge. Here are some key characteristics of a modern enterprise BI platform.
Web-Based
Web-based business intelligence tools like Looker, Intellicus, Sisense, etc, do not require downloading and synchronization like desktop software. With new-age Javascript frameworks (Angular JS, React JS, etc.) and lightweight API servers, modern enterprise BI tools do not need desktop coding for maintenance. They are much more secure and easier to deploy, scale, and upgrade. In addition to a robust framework, web-based BI tools also bring a lot of flexibility to the delivery of reports. Users can access reports and dashboards when they need them, on any device of their choice.
Multi-Tenant
Multi-tenant BI applications bring a lot of scalability and affordability, especially to larger enterprises where the users are spread across departments and locations. A multi-tenant BI application can seamlessly run multiple BI instances in a consolidated manner. It delivers a truly unified experience where each location or department or user can process their data and run multiple reports without the need of deploying the BI tool at multiple places. This enables larger enterprises to easily scale up or down as per their requirement and makes their BI projects extremely cost affective. Multi-tenant BI tools also empower enterprises to govern data access centrally and give users access to what is relevant to them as per their role and responsibility. They provide sandboxes for data scientists and business analysts to bring together data from multiple corporate applications and user systems and sync everything to create data models. While every department may run their reports, changes made at corporate level can be easily pushed down to all instances.
Data engineering and analytics
Modern enterprise analytics tools offer end to end data processing and analytical capabilities. From collating data from multiple sources to transforming and preparing it for analytics they offer cover all aspects of business intelligence. Powered by AI and machine learnings, modern day BI tool can automate data fetching, transformation and ingestion to create smart data pipelines. This means that the most concurrent data is available for analytics, whenever users create reports. Furthermore, workflows can be created to automate report generation, distribution and alerts.
Built in data science and ML
Enterprises no longer to invest in multiple applications to get predictions and forecasts or perform advanced analytics. Modern BI tools come with tightly integrated data science and machine learning algorithms to create data models and bring out deeper insights from their data. From bringing out correlations in data from multiple sources to identifying anomalies, machine learning driven analytics makes it much easier for business users to get accurate predictions and forecasts every day. Users can get predictive insights, do what-if analysis and get accurate recommendations on what they should fix to improve outcomes.
Plethora of data connections
Modern enterprise BI tools can connect seamlessly with a variety of data sources. Ranging from traditional DBMS to now IoT devices, BI tools have developed seamless connectors to read and structure data in real time. Via direct connectors or APIs can read data from enterprise applications (on prem or cloud), legacy systems, GIS data and more. They can further query and join data from multiple systems to bring out correlations even at the minutest levels.
Shared Analytics
Modern enterprise BI tools make it easy for users to share insights with each other in real time. Whether through mobile BI or otherwise, users can easily mark or annotate findings and share it with relevant stakeholders on the go. While sharing is seamless, utmost care is taken for data security as well. Modern BI tool have robust user management mechanisms through which the extent of data sharing can be monitored and controlled. In shared reports, users can see the insights according to their roles and permissions only. The whole process is simple, secure and seamless and ensures productive collaboration amongst the users.
Embedded BI
Most enterprises want a unified experience for their users. They do not want users to keep switching windows to view insights, compare trends and then map it back to legacy systems. This has led to a huge demand of embedded BI tools. These BI tools can be seamlessly integrated into existing applications and be rebranded in the same look and feel. This makes it much easier and faster for the business users to adapt the BI tool and use it effortlessly, right inside their existing tools. Most modern BI tools are embeddable and offer a SSO integration with other applications.
