When you need to select a business intelligence product, it’s important to consider lots of factors.
At first place, specific product features like ease of use, ease of implementation and administration,
scalability, user-interface options, and how well it integrates into your company’s
existing and future platform environment.
Among the most important of these considerations are:
• An integrated product suite with a range of functions that your company can need. As your company grows, it should not outgrow
the software of its BI vendor. This is important. In addition, individual users may require different functions, and an integrated product suite provides the greatest deployment flexibility.
• The scalability to handle an expanding user base as your organization grows and usage increases. As your organization gains experience with BI
and its usefulness becomes evident, it’s quite likely that its usage will spread quickly.
• The ability to access and integrate a wide variety of different data sources. Although many companies
initially run their analyses against individual systems, the time will come when data from several sources is
needed to show the total picture. A product suite that includes data integration technology and the ability
to have the data appear as if it were located in a single source allows you to accomplish this easily.
• Data-quality functionality to ensure a trustworthy data foundation so that your company is analyzing accurate,
consistent, and complete data. This is important because it can help you to avoid
the problems associated with having “multiple versions of the truth.”
• Integration with your desktop software, in particular Microsoft Office.
This allows users to complement BI with their familiar desktop tools, which can reduce your organization’s training requirements.
• Support for multiple operating systems. You can keep your future options open and not constrain your
organization to a single operating system. Linux is growing rapidly in importance, and your BI solution
should support it.
• Ease of initial installation and deployment, as well as ease of adding more users. This not only makes it easy
to add new users quickly but can increase the productivity of your IT
department.
• Powerful but easy-to-use administration tools. Your IT department needs to control “who can access what” and provide a level of security and
privacy that’s simply not possible in a spreadsheet-only environment.
Your data is an organizational asset that your BI products should help you protect, while allowing those who
need to analyze it to do so efficiently.
• Robust report cataloging and distribution functions that allow authorized business users to receive their analyses on both a periodic-subscription
and an on-request basis. A function to alert users when certain events or value thresholds occur is also important.
• The ability to deliver reports to a wide variety of desktop and mobile devices, with content formatted to match the functionality of these devices
• Strong search functionality that facilitates finding needed information and locating relevant analyses
So, as you can see, there's a lot of factors to consider, before making any decision.
More information on this topic you can find in original white paper from the source link below.
Source: https://www.sapvirtualagency.com