How to choose a business intelligence solution ?

Data is at the heart of every digital companies nowadays. Facebook, Airbnb, Netflix, Amazon Google are using it every day to keep a head up on their competition and make better decisions based on real time data and facts rather than opinions.

Nowadays, becoming the best business in the market means mastering the art of data internally. In this article we will learn the basic to choose a solution to pilot your business with data, aka a business intelligence solution.

What is a business intelligence solution

Business intelligence solution are an interface over raw data that allow decision makers and data analyst to explore and answer questions with data. This is a very broad definition and most of the business intelligence solution differ in term of features.

In this guide we will focus on which features you should look for as a buyer for such solutions when your company is growing.

From 1 to 10 employees

Situation

You are an early stage company, and as most early stage companies you are still in the process to define clearly how you operate. Therefore with every new hire your company and your internal processes are evolving rapidly with new ideas. This fosters a lot of innovation, but makes it really hard to understand with data what is working than what is not working.

Who should be in charge of data ?

In an early stage startup usually the person responsible for the data is someone from the C-Level. You are iterating fast and the C-Level is deeply involved in the operational processes.

What you should be looking for in your BI tool ?

At this stage you probably use a lot of SaaS tools and your reporting should be based on them. You should use a lightweight solution that allow you to iterate fast. Typical solutions for this stage are:

• Supermetrics
• Databox
• Google data studio
• Whaly

From 10 to 100 employees

Situation

You are starting to mature as a company and know you have a build a repeatable sales / product motion. Your employees are responsible for part of your processes, therefore you need a layer on top of your process to understand clearly what how smooth things are going. C-Level starts to be more of a coach than a team player.

Who should be in charge of data ?

At this stage you should have someone clearly identified in your company that handles all data request. This would allow you to have a repeatable process to identify and industrialise the common questions asked by member of your organisation. This person should report to the C-Level directly as most of the questions will be risen by this entity

What you should be looking for in your BI tool ?

You are looking for a tool that allow you to do data preparation as well as visualization, your tool should have basic governance capabilities. Common tools at this stage are:

• Looker
• Power BI
• Tableau
• Whaly

From 100 to (sky is the limit 🌌) employees

Situation

You are a mature company and you have several hundreds of person collaborating every day on several business units / product line. One key component of success for those decentralised teams is the capability of following a common goal and grow in the same direction.

Who should be in charge of data ?

You should have a proper team in place to answer all the questions asked by your organisation. Ideally this team should cover:

• Data engineering: capabilities to move data from sources to your warehouse
• Data analytics: capabilities to answer questions with data
• Data scientist: capabilities to create products from data
• Functional analytics: capabilities to bridge the gap between business teams and the data team.

What you should be looking for in your BI tool ?

Capabilities should include, strong governance (capabilities to control and create custom ACLs), strong collaboration layer (capability to create snapshots and release of your environment, testing release and collaboratively working on a new release). Main players for those capabilities are:

• Looker
• Sisense
• Tableau
• Whaly

Conclusion

For each stage of your company your needs are evolving, therefore, the solution you pick must evolve with you.

There is a lot of different BI tools on the market but very few are designed to scale with you. Before making a choice you should assess what your priorities are, and pick the solution that fits exactly your priorities.

At Whaly we pride ourselves that our solution evolve with your needs so that you don't have to go under heavy migration when you scale.