Data is king, no matter the industry. Whether in healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, or the technology sphere, fast insights that give you operational visibility and uncover hidden opportunities are the key to accelerating past the competition. 

It's why business intelligence (BI) tools have gained such traction. By having a centralized platform that can pool together, analyze, and visualize data from various sources, you can drive success across all functions, like marketing, sales, operations, and finance.    

With the New Year approaching, it's an excellent time to entertain new ideas that could improve your bottom line for 2024. For your business, this could mean changing BI tools or investing in one for the first time. Regardless, you've come to the right place to begin the journey.  

In addition to generic software attributes to consider during a purchase, like price, scalability, user-friendliness, and customer service availability, we've put together the ultimate feature checklist for BI tool purchases in 2024, including: 

1. Advanced Analytics Features
2. Augmented Data Discovery
3. Self-Service Reporting and Insight Distribution
4. Predictive Analytics and Forecasting Tools
5. Natural Language Processing
6. Dashboards and Data Visualization
7. Wide Range of Third-Party Integration Options
8. Mobile Functionality
9. Data Governance and Security Controls

1. Advanced Analytics Features

Advanced analytics are a must-have feature since you're using a BI tool to interpret large data sets. These capabilities let you automatically run algorithms and statistical analysis to find patterns, trends, and opportunities — an alternative to having a data scientist run the numbers by hand. 

For example, you might take a pool of purchase and inventory data and find customers tend to spend more money on specific products during the winter than others — prompting you to invest more in marketing those products during that time. Alternatively, you could analyze workflows and find a particular manufacturing process bottleneck for the whole supply chain, forcing you to find remediation solutions. 

2. Augmented Data Discovery

Obtaining BI with out-of-date, inaccurate, or poorly formatted data is a cause for trouble. Data discovery features utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) or preset system governance parameters to ensure an accurate information analysis. It lets users clean up data sets, keep data formats consistent, and correct errors during analysis before they affect the results of the insights gathered. 

3. Self-Service Reporting and Insight Distribution

The intuitiveness of a platform is a key differentiator for any software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. The same holds for BI tools. It shouldn't only be data scientists with a heavy technical background being able to get insights that drive decisions. Every end-user, from a sales team leader to a warehouse manager to an IT director, should be able to create ad hoc reports, interact with dashboards, and quickly share their findings with colleagues through email or chat.

4. Predictive Analytics and Forecasting Tools

To stay ahead of the competition in 2024, you'll need to think ahead. Predictive analytics and forecasting features in a BI tool do just that. Typically powered by AI, these capabilities let you evaluate trends and historical data to estimate future outcomes. You could do things like forecast sales revenue to drive spending decisions, predict new product purchases to help with warehouse capacity planning, and even estimate when manufacturing equipment needs upcoming maintenance.  

5. Natural Language Processing

Using your own words to command a BI tool on what you'd like it to do significantly contributes to self-service capabilities. Natural Language Processing (NLP) uses AI and ML to interpret human language, either typed or spoken words, so that a user can interact with a BI platform. 

For example, you could tell the system to "generate a profitability report for last quarter," "forecast the number of insurance claims expected for next month," or "find the bottleneck in our manufacturing operation" for the system to run the analysis and deliver your request.

6. Dashboards and Data Visualization

A long spreadsheet of numbers is intimidating to an everyday business user and could cause you to miss out on seeing meaningful insights. Your BI platform should be fully equipped with interactive dashboards and data visualization tools that make your data more digestible. Using charts and graphs makes it far easier to spot outlier data points, trends, and patterns in the data sets you can use for making decisions.

7. Wide Range of Third-Party Integration Options

Keep in mind that a BI tool is obsolete without the integrated applications that flow data into it. That said, you must ensure your BI platform supports multi-tenancy — letting you connect with your business SaaS tools either through an application programming interface (API) or direct integration. For more advanced capabilities, find a product that offers embedded BI where you can get reporting and analytics right within your custom applications. 

8. Mobile Functionality

Whether you're meeting with a sales prospect at their office, an insured client onsite to process a claim, or visiting a manufacturing plant for evaluation, you'll need on-the-go capabilities in plenty of circumstances. Mobile BI functionality gives you all the features, like analytics, dashboard reporting, insight sharing, and others, on your iOS or Android devices. This ensures you maintain operational visibility and get data access even when you're away from your desk.

9. Data Governance and Security Controls

Your data must maintain robust quality, security, and integrity for your BI tool to function correctly. Misformatted, out-of-date, incomplete, and compromised data sets put you at risk of receiving bad insights. On the governance side, find a BI tool that lets you set validation rules, track data lineage, and enforce policies for data management and who can enter, edit, and analyze your records. 

Regarding security, your BI system must have role-based permission-setting controls for who can access specific resources. It should also leverage protocols like multi-factor authentication (MFA), support single sign-on (SSO) authorization, follow rigorous data encryption standards, and integrate into Active Directory (AD) for centralized network visibility and security management. 

Final Thoughts

A dependable BI platform can be the difference between your business hitting its ambitious 2024 performance goals and missing the mark. It comes down to finding the right product with advanced features, such as data discovery, visualization, forecasting, integrations, and many others, that can give you the most out of your data and spot valuable insights that improve your bottom line.