Five Must-Have Features of BI Platforms

CIO Applications| Monday, August 23, 2021

Platforms are continuously seeking ways to automate this process and democratize its utility as analysis grows more sophisticated with new algorithms and advanced analytics methodologies.

Fremont, CA: Business intelligence (BI) engineer and business intelligence analyst are terms that are frequently interchanged. Because the job requirements and needs differ, this causes a lot of misunderstanding. A business intelligence analyst uses current infrastructure to provide reports and analytics that help management make decisions. A business intelligence engineer can help with this, but they are also in charge of developing and maintaining the infrastructure and architecture that supports continuing analysis and reporting. Let us look at five essential features in BI platforms:

Data Cataloging

You'll be in charge of creating a platform that gives your BI analysts the tools they need to accomplish their data production and analysis tasks efficiently. This set of capabilities will spread beyond the BI team as data gets more democratized across the enterprise. Other departments' power users and data analysts will need to interact with your platform at a much higher level.

You must first understand the metadata architecture incorporated into the business intelligence platform candidates to analyze this. The business layer and the technical layer are the metadata components that are crucial to your evaluation.

Data Visualization

When comparing alternative business intelligence platforms, data visualization is one of the first things to consider, and it will become the yardstick by which your team's success is measured. Your users will assess your success based on the quality of the final product. They will be concerned with the aesthetics as well as the timeliness and accuracy of the reports.

Automated Insights

Platforms must be able to support automated insights as part of this. Features such as automatic chart type selection to match the data, automated data attribute selection, regressive trend recognition, and natural language processing to extract structured data pieces from unstructured data sources are possible.

Security

Examine which solutions enable a security strategy that effectively prevents the wrong persons from obtaining the incorrect data while allowing analysts to provide vital data for decision-making. Next, examine how the platform manages user configuration and role-based access controls while evaluating its security. Finally, examine how the system authenticates users and whether it can be connected to your existing security systems to reduce duplication of management efforts.

Data Delivery

Dashboards are a fantastic way to get data into the hands of your users, but they aren't the only ones. Dashboards are simply one technique to meet the demand that is based on the pull. However, they necessitate that the user logs into the system regularly to consume the available data. If you have a lot of busy users, you know you need a backup plan to get data into their hands using push-based approaches. Your business intelligence platform will need to have a separate set of capabilities for this.