Baffled When Choosing Business Intelligence Analytics Tools?
September 23, 2015
Most of the professionals whom I know use one software package for most of their business intelligence needs. What do you use? SAS, SPSS, raw algorithms from Mertler’s and Vannatta’s Advanced and Multivariate Statistical Methods, Diffeo, Mathematica, or some other tool?
The answer, gentle reader, is Excel. Yep, the son of 1-2-3 by way of ruled ledger paper.
I read “Which BI Analytics Tool Does My Company Need?” and figured out the angle of attack after a couple of paragraphs. Here’s the tip off:
BI analytics tools. No one-size-fits-all.
Excel, however, comes pretty close to the horseshoe stake. The reasons include:
- It is not particularly intimidating. Anyone can plug in numbers, select a numerical recipe, and get an output
- Excel is available widely
- Students get some exposure in school, usually before high school, even in rural Kentucky.
The write up does not identify specific vendors or products. The article is a useful collection of jargon:
- Visual oriented analytics. Translation: graphs
- Packaged applications. Translation: Excel
- Limited exploration. Translation: Canned reports set up for the user by the developer
- Operational snapshots: Translation: More canned reports.
My thought: Isn’t analytics based business intelligence easy? I have observed Excel users’ selecting numerical recipes from the “formulas” provided with Excel and seeing what happens when applied to a collection of data. How does that work out in your experience?
Business intelligence may be considered an oxymoron by some.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2015
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One Response to “Baffled When Choosing Business Intelligence Analytics Tools?”
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No doubt Excel is an often underrated analytics tool. In fact, most of the newer BI softwares aren’t really meant to replace Excel but to compliment it in terms of supporting greater visual capabilities, easier data mash-ups with tables from other sources, and most of all – support for larger datasets. If you’re working with big data, you will inevitably be limited by Excel’s 1 million row limit. Other signs you need more powerful BI software can be found in this article: http://www.sisense.com/blog/5-signs-its-time-to-ditch-excel-reporting/