Often organisations find it difficult and labour intensive to execute a software selection process in order to gather all the necessary data. The in-depth and independent BI & Reporting Tool Survey 2012 is designed to help you perform the selection quickly and very efficiently. There are many more reasons why to buy the survey.

If there is at the moment no structured software selection process at all in your organization, you may find the information below or the survey very useful. Even if there is a corporate standard you need to comply with. Or even when you may have a database or reporting tools in place from a specific vendor, and you consider buying a BI tool from the same vendor because you expect that these will integrate better with each other. The BI Tool Survey may confirm your companies standards or preferences, or it is also possible that it will reveal that your companies standard should be updated.

1. Create a business intelligence strategy

Choosing and selecting a BI tool is a process that begins with defining a business intelligence strategy, compliant with the overall business strategy and requirements. Without a proper bi strategy, buying a BI tool, will be the same as buying a very nice and expensive car, which runs on a type of fuel which is not available in the country where you want to drive it!

2. Define criteria in business terms

Once the strategy is clear, you can define the business critical selection criteria, like ‘Our business people want to keep track of history’. In that case you need a BI Tool that has standard support for slowly changing dimensions out-of-the-box.

Another example: one of the business strategies is to exchange more critical information with customers and vendors. You need a BI tool that performs well with a huge number of users, having a robust infrastructure with load balancing and clustering. By doing so, we make a clear connection between the criteria and the business strategy, an essential factor for success.

All the sixteen Business Intelligence tools in the BI Tool Survey 2012 are compared against these criteria (a total of 103 criteria).

3. Create a short-list

Once you have all the criteria in place, you will be able, with the information in the BI Tool Survey 2012, to decide which tools match your criteria. From there, you can create easily a short-list of two or three solutions.

4. Invite vendors for a live demonstration

In this phase of the BI selection process, you will invite the vendors on the short-list for a live demonstration of their solution. We recommended that you prepare this meeting in detail with the vendor, to avoid demonstrations by PowerPoint. If possible, provide the vendors with some company data, so you can easily see the relevance of what is demonstrated and judge how well it functions.

5. Perform a proof-of-concept (PoC)

Doing a proof-of-concept (PoC) is essential for choosing a BI tool that suits your organisation. So you can test the solution in your own IT environment, and get an idea of the functionality, connectivity, usability and performance of each BI tool.

Define beforehand what has to be done, what the results should be and what data should be used. Be sure, that the data in your source systems are accessible. In general, a proof-of-concept, can be done in three to five days. To keep negotiation options open, it is recommended that a PoC is performed with at least two vendors.

6. Negotiate with BI vendors

The last step before the end of the selection, is to negotiate with the business intelligence vendors about the contract, including prices, maintenance, support, training and terms of use. Many software vendors require you to buy a runtime as well as a development license. Put all the different prices and terms in a spreadsheet, and calculate the costs over at least three years to see which vendor has the best conditions over a longer period.

7. Close the deal

Finally, you want to close the deal with the vendor that has the best support for your business intelligence strategy, and has the lowest costs. If you want help with above, please feel free to contact us and ask us to help you with the software selection.

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