Three Top Questions To Ask a BI Vendor

I stumbled upon a very good article by Boris Evelson at Forrester Blog that reveals the unpopular fact about the essence of BI in a big organization. The first point really hits the bull's eye as eventually what controls the changes in BI matters the most in terms of minimizing risk and cutting cost.

Q1: What are the capabilities of your services organization to help clients not just with implementing your BI tool, but with their overall BI strategy.

Most BI vendors these days have modern, scalable, function rich, robust BI tools. So a real challenge today is not with the tools, but with governance, integration, support, organizational structures, processes etc – something that only experienced consultants can help with.

Q2: Do you provide all components necessary for an end to end BI environment (data integration, data cleansing, data warehousing, performance management, portals, etc in addition to reports, queries, OLAP and dashboards)?

If a vendor does not you'll have to integrate these components from multiple vendors.

Q3. Within the top layer of BI, do you provide all components necessary for reporting, querying and analysis such as report writer, query builder, OLAP engine, dashboard/data visualization tool, real time reporting/analysis, text analytics, BI workspace/sandbox, advanced analytics, ability to analyze data without a data model (usually associate with in-memory engines)

If a vendor does not, believe me the users will ask for them sooner or later, so you'll have to integrate these components from multiple vendors.

I also strongly recommended that the editor discounts questions that vendors and other analysts may provide like:

• do you have modern architecture
• do you use SOA
• can you enable end user self service
• is your BI app user friendly

because these are all mostly a commodity these days.