How not to buy a BI product

Nigel Pendse from the OLAP Report gives practical advice to avoid the numerous pitfalls when buying BI products

In the article linked below Nigel Pendse has a few tips for people who are thinking of purchasing a BI product. He first outlines some of the pitfalls that are there if you get it wrong:

• At worst, the project could be a complete failure, with all of the software and services costs written off.
• Some of the project will survive, but the benefits will be minimal. This will ensure even less incentives for replacing this failed system.
• Some projects have big ambitions for company-wide rollout. Because of the failure, only a small portion of employees get to use the product, but if a wider rollout is required, the entire selection process will have to be carried out again.
• A vendor's enthusiasm may encourage the selection team to purchase unnecessary licences when a simple solution (perhaps using excel!) may work just as well - or even better.

A summary of the tips follows (in no particular order). Sometimes it is not necessary that all of these steps are carried out in your company - you should make sure that your vendor has done it for you.

• Ensure that both end-users and your IT department are involved in the evaluations of the BI products and in the selection of the eventual product.
• Conduct a formal multi-product evaluation and don't pick a product because of the company who develops it!
• Assess your needs - predict what your users really need instead of what they say they want.
• Sometimes your company may need more than one product - be open to this type of solution. It may save you money in the long run. Some power-users will have different requirements than most other users - don't try to buy several licences of an expensive product just because it suits the power users. A simpler cheaper product may suit most of your employees.
• Don't evaluate too many products in detail - some products can be eliminated by just looking at your needs.
• It is not necessarily the best option to buy from the largest vendor.
• Examine the financial costs - a good list of headings under which to do this is available in the article.
• Test at least two of the products - most of them have free licences for trial periods.

Don't test every product you investigate - some of them should be ruled out at an early
stage. Three products should be the maximum you test.

Read the article here

http://www.olapreport.com/How_not_to_buy.htm.

[Update - you now have to subscribe to get access to the report at that link. According to a link on Timo Elliot's blog, you can now access an older version of the article (more about OLAP than BI) here.]

QlikView BI product demo analysing American Presidents

QlikTech, developers of a Business Intelligence tool, demonstrate their product using data pertaining to American Presidents.

This demo is a nice simple example of how BI tools can be used to present data in a manner that makes it easy to do further analysis. The data for this demo comes from a couple of ".csv" files, but it could just as easily come from one or more databases.

How This Product Could Work For You
The data displayed can be any data - it could be data from your current system detailing salespeople, customers, products, margins, etc.

Tabs can easily be created allowing you to analyse sales per area, sales per salesperson, margin per product, margin per retail store, margin per salesperson, etc.

Expected sales figures can also be included and warnings produced when these figures are not reached.

You won't need to log on to any tool to get this information - you could have it emailed to you weekly or only when certain conditions are not met.

Call us on 01 2542320 to arrange a demo with your data in your office.

View Demo

STEP THROUGH THE DEMO

There are a number of tabs available – the first two are information about the demo.

You can go to any of the three other tabs and click away to see how it works. All tabs are interrelated – if you select an item on one of the tabs, it will impact what is displayed on the other tabs (this does not have to be the case – all tabs could contain completely different data). When you click on an item, it should turn green to show that it is selected. All related items will turn white. All non-related items will turn grey.
Go through the following steps:

• In the "Presidents" tab, there is a box labelled "Party" on the left hand side. Click on "Dem.-Rep". It turns green. The number 4 indicates that there were four Presidents from this party.

• In the "Name" box, the four Presidents from that party are highlighted in white.
• All other Presidents are in grey.
• In the "Table Box" box, the four Presidents are the only ones that are visible.
• There is lots of data available on each of the Presidents here.
• There is no information visible in the "Additional Information" box as the information for each President selected is different so cannot be displayed here.
• In the "Sequence" box, you can see that these four Presidents were the 3rd, 4th,5th and 6th Presidents of the USA.
• Click on the "Charts" tab. As there are only have been four Presidents from this party, the information here isn’t overwhelming – you can see that three of them came from Virginia.
• Click on the "Photo" tab. The photos for each of the four selected Presidents are visible on the right hand side.

• Go back to the "Presidents" tab and click on the green button "Clear Selections"
• Click on "Republican" and then "Democrat" in the "Party" Box and see how it impacts the selections in the other boxes and tabs. The charts are more interesting when some of the larger parties are selected.
• You can click in any of the selections in any of the tabs to select a range of Presidents for which you want to see data. For example, you can click on any state in the "Charts" tab to see a list of the Presidents from that state in the "Presidents" tab.