Going Beyond the Limitations of Traditional BI Reporting

Like any technology, business intelligence (BI) has come a long way since its inception. Capabilities and features are always advancing to keep up with evolving needs. Organizations aiming to harness data-driven decision making as a competitive differentiator must stay abreast of these developments.

Sticking with legacy BI to avoid the expense of investing in newer, more advanced tools can actually cost your company more in the long run. Stubbornly deciding to use legacy BI systems is false economy. While you may save some money in the short-term on upgrade costs, you're ultimately missing out on the longer-term potential financial benefits.

Here's more on what it means to go beyond the limitations of traditional business intelligence reporting and why it's so important to do so.

Challenges of Traditional BI Reporting

Let's talk about some of the key challenges of traditional BI reporting.

First of all, legacy business intelligence systems often require IT and data specialists to act as intermediaries in some form. In other words, employees can lack direct and immediate access to ad hoc data insights. The result? Users may miss opportunities to ask questions, pick up on real-time patterns and get timely information when they need it most. This model can impose data latency as well as delays when users must wait to get their hands on crucial information - especially if the IT team has to create reports and pass them along to other teams.

Another significant challenge associated with traditional BI reporting is its static nature. Rarely does a report or chart answer all questions at a glance. Without the ability to drill down for additional context, users are inevitably going to miss potential insights.

Advanced Analytics: Accessible & Interactive Data Insights

Today's agile and advanced BI platforms represent a huge advancement in BI reporting over the legacy players and their static limitations.

It's the difference between employees having to make do with a "what you see is what you get" report most likely created by the IT team vs. employees being empowered to ask questions and get interactive answers on demand. Think about the immense impact such readily available data insights can make when used to influence decision-making.

Truly forward-thinking companies are purposefully going behind traditional BI - harnessing the power of advanced analytics - rather than continuing to center their data strategies around reports alone.

Here's how MarketWatch describes this phenomenon: "Advanced analytics and BI are highly complementary as the former can provide a more in-depth, explorative perspective on the data, while BI systems provide a more structured user experience in terms of dashboard visualization, reporting, performance management metrics, etc."

Advanced analytics empower users to freely query data on their own terms and continue to dive down into the results through interactivity. They also capitalize on artificial intelligence algorithms capable of doing in seconds what can take human analysts hundreds of hours. They automatically uncover trends, anomalies and relationships hidden within data, then push that info to the decision-makers who can put them into action.