Choosing the Right BI Tool: 15 Questions and Answers

We recently held a webinar that presented how to choose the right BI tool for your business. If you didn’t get a chance to attend or want to take another look, you can watch it here.

Some of the areas we covered included how to:

• Better understand your use case and its requirements.
• Differentiate between BI terms such as reporting, analytics, and visualizations.
• Determine success criteria when evaluating your options.

Additionally, we explained why having a single BI platform can increase your efficiency and improve business performance.

As with all of our webinars, we encouraged attendees to ask questions throughout the event, helping to explore specific topics in more detail.

Continue reading for a list of the top questions and answers related to choosing the right BI tool for your organization and use case.

Do you have any resources that further discuss how data insights can be monetized?

Yes, for more information, take a look at this short blog post on how to monetize your data in six simple steps.

If we give our business users access to ad hoc, self-service data exploration, how can we ensure that they will not destroy other visualizations or data models?

The easiest way to control the types of actions that different users can perform is by setting up appropriate user permissions. Typically, only technical admins will have the ability to modify data models or perform other tasks that could have a larger impact on the analytics solution.

Does GoodData support the use of custom objects in the dashboards?

Yes, our new dashboard plugins allow for even greater customization of GoodData dashboards. With this functionality, you can create and integrate custom code into GoodData dashboards to insert custom objects and enhance the user experience.

I work at a company that provides SaaS for healthcare organizations. We haven’t decided if we should host the BI solution ourselves or not. Do you have a decision diagram that could help?

When you begin talking to BI providers, we advise you to ask about security shields that they can provide (e.g., HIPAA compliance), and if their security standards can support the data that your company handles.

What tasks can be automated with GoodData’s automation workflow?

GoodData’s automation workflow — Lifecycle Management — can help companies automate user or user group provisioning and de-provisioning. It can also help you automate your product releases, versioning, and control.

Does GoodData offer a trial so that we can conduct an evaluation ourselves first?

Yes, we do offer a free trial of our product. You can access it below.

What do you mean by distributing analytics to external stakeholders?

This is the instance in which you give data analytics access to your customers, business partners, suppliers, or any other external parties involved in your business. This process involves the same sharing of the semantic model and data as you would for an internal analytics use case (e.g., delivering analytics to employees).

What authentication mechanisms does GoodData provide?

GoodData provides SAML 2.0-based mechanisms, such as Okta, Auth0, Fluig, and more. Depending on your current situation and use case, the GoodData PGP SSO can be easier to implement than SAML SSO. For further information, you can refer to the documentation here.

What do you mean by the reusability of metrics?

The reusability of metrics allows you to easily compose new metrics and reuse existing ones for ad-hoc exploration. This is possible as a result of having a strong semantic layer that ensures the consistency and veracity of metrics. In short, your team will create the building blocks that can be later used within customer-specific metrics or ad-hoc self-service data analysis.

What is the semantic layer?

The semantic layer is a shield between the underlying data in the data model and your analytical queries. It represents relationships between different entities in the data model while translating that data into commonly understood business terms.

Does an app exist that allows me to see responsive GoodData dashboards via mobile?

GoodData’s dashboards are responsive out-of-the-box and compatible with mobile.

The types of questions you are showing here look very helpful. Do you have any publicly available checklists that we could use for inspiration?

Yes, we have created an e-book that contains a checklist of different questions that you may want to ask during the evaluation process.

Conducting a proof of concept sounds interesting. Do vendors offer this for free, or should I expect to pay for it?

Different vendors approach this in different ways: Some may offer this for free, while some charge a small fee. Either way, we always recommend conducting a proof of concept to make sure you’re making the right choice.

Is there a GoodData SDK that our frontend devs can you use? Do you have some code examples?

Yes. We do. GoodData.UI is our React-based JavaScript library, where you can find interactive examples in a code sandbox.

Where can we find additional information about headless BI?

We feature plenty of information on our website. You can also access the recording of our webinar, “An Introduction to Headless BI,” or read this Medium article.

Next Steps:

Keen to understand whether GoodData is the right BI tool for your business? Register for our free trial and get started today.