For a few years now, Business Intelligence (BI) has helped companies to collect, analyze, monitor, and present their data in an efficient way to extract actionable insights that will ensure sustainable growth. With this industry having its boom in the past decade, the offer of new solutions with different features has grown exponentially making the market as competitive as ever.

In fact, it is expected that by 2025, the BI market will grow to $33.3 billion, paired with the fact that 33% of large-sized businesses will practice decision intelligence by 2023. And not just that, with COVID-19 and remote work now being a permanent business practice, the need for more intuitive platforms that will facilitate teamwork has become critical.

Taking all these into consideration, it is impossible to ignore the benefits that your business can endure from implementing BI tools into their data management process. If you are looking to enter the BI software world but don’t know which features you should look for before investing in one, this post will cover the top business intelligence features and benefits to help you make an informed decision.

Let’s get to it!

Benefits Of Business Intelligence Software

To start putting the power of BI software into perspective, let’s see some of the main benefits your company can gain from using these solutions.

• Improved decision-making: Making decisions based on data instead of human intuition can be defined as the core benefit of BI software. By optimizing every single department and area of your business with powerful insights extracted from your own data you will ensure your business succeeds in the long run. Data analysis is no longer meant for technical users, business intelligence software is self-service, empowering everyone in your organization to work with data for their decision-making process.  
• Enhance communication: In today’s fast-paced world where people can work from various parts of the globe, finding effective ways to communicate is essential for success. Business intelligence tools provide you with interactive BI dashboards that serve as powerful communication tools to keep teams engaged and connected. Through powerful data visualizations, managers and team members can get a bigger picture of their performance to optimize their processes and ensure healthy project development. 
• Reduce bottlenecks: As mentioned, one of the main benefits you can gain from investing in professional BI software is getting access to relevant insights into your business performance that would otherwise remain untapped. Thanks to real-time data provided by these solutions, you can spot potential issues and tackle them before they become bigger crises. No matter the size of your data sets, BI tools facilitate the analysis process by letting you extract fresh insights within seconds. 
• Save time and resources: While traditional data management practices encourage the use of spreadsheets and static reports, modern BI solutions offer several features to automate the analysis process and make it more interactive and efficient. For instance, you can add all your data sources into one single point of access within seconds, and the tool will automatically update them with no need for manual work saving a lot of time that can be dedicated to other tasks. Additionally, these tools will save your company a lot of money on implementing wrong strategies that are not backed by data, optimize your service to increase revenues, and find profitable opportunities. 

17 Top Features Of Business Intelligence Tools

Now that we’ve briefly discussed the benefits of using BI software in your business, it is time to list the prime features you should consider when investing in one of them. Here we will cover the top 17 BI features dividing them into the 4 main steps of the data analysis process: connecting the data, analyzing it, visualizing it, and reporting on the results. Let’s get started! 

1) Connect

The first section of this list of prime features of business intelligence software aims to cover the initial stage of the data analysis process. No matter the business size, companies are collecting data from multiple sources. This data is usually saved in different databases, external applications, or in an indefinite number of Excel sheets which makes it almost impossible to combine different data sets and update every source promptly. BI tools aim to make data integration a simple task by providing the following features:  

a) Data Connectors

Our first business intelligence feature is the earliest step in the data analysis process, and it refers to being able to connect all your internal and external data sources into one single point of access. Having to manually deal with all your data from different channels is a painful task that takes a lot of time. Thanks to modern data connectors, data integration has never been easier. Connect databases, flat files, social media data, APIs, CRM data, and several other sources with just a few clicks. Once your sources are connected, you don’t need to worry about manually updating them as the software automatically shows you the latest data available. The image below shows just a few of the various data connectors offered by datapine.

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b) Flexible Data Integration

Having flexible data integration is another important feature you should look for when investing in BI software for your business. The tool you choose should provide you with different storage options for your data such as a remote connection or being stored in a data warehouse. On one hand, the remote connection allows you to keep all your data on your server and access it remotely. This means you will rely on the speed and capacities of your own servers when querying your data. On the other hand, keeping your data in the tool’s warehouse means your analytical data will be cloned and stored by the software, which will automatically update it for fresh business insights. The benefit of a software’s internal data warehouse is that they create specialized solutions that have faster and more efficient servers created to support massive amounts of information.

c) Join Data Sources

One last business intelligence feature related to connecting your information is being able to join data sources. Meaning, you can easily unify data from multiple sources to run cross-database queries and extract advanced business insights. Having the technology to match and unify data from multiple sources is critical to get the needed insights to make your business succeed. Modern BI tools should provide you with this power by defining relationships between your individual sources with a few clicks, for example by setting up foreign keys.

2) Analytics

Once you have all your data in one place, it is time to start making sense of it. This is where the analytical part of the process starts. With the rise of modern self-service BI tools, you no longer need to be a data scientist to understand your business information. This set of BI features aims to make the analytical process user-friendly, time-efficient, and accessible while still performing advanced analytics to take your data to the next level. 

a) Drag & drop

Traditionally, reporting and analytics have only been meant for IT specialists to perform, making the process segregated for non-technical users. The basis of self-service BI tools is the ease of use and accessibility. This makes having an intuitive drag and drop interface one of the most critical BI features concerning the analytical process. Essentially, the drag and drop feature enables you, or anyone in your organization, to query and visualize data without writing a single line of SQL code. It is as simple as selecting fields from your data sources, dragging them into the y and x-axis, and defining any other conditions for your charts such as dimensions or filters. In a matter of seconds, you can visualize your most important performance indicators instead of waiting hours or days for the IT department to deliver a report.

b) Custom fields & expressions

Custom fields are an essential part of business intelligence since they allow you to clean your data and manipulate it in order to perform advanced analysis. The tool you choose to invest in should enable you to calculate the most complex business metrics by using existing expressions but also by creating customized expressions that are not present in your databases. The use of custom fields allows you to combine several dimensions into a merged field with the help of various joint types, as well as create individual calculated fields from different data sources. Thus, you will be able to create formulas for any data analysis scenario, giving you a lot more control over your data management. A modern online data analysis tool such as datapine enables you to generate custom fields easily via drag & drop.

c) Cross queries

Moving on with our list of business intelligence capabilities comes the ability to generate cross queries between different data sources. We already introduced this concept a little bit in the connectors section of this post, the cross queries feature enables you to create charts and graphs using information from different data sets using an intuitive drag and drop interface. The true value of the cross queries feature lies in the fact that you can have all your available data in one place, enabling you to make fully informed decisions without missing any important information. The only requirement is that all data sources that you want to merge need to be located in the tool’s warehouse. Additionally, you can generate your own cross queries by using SQL codes for a more advanced approach.

d) Trend analysis

Trend analysis is another important feature of business intelligence and, as its name suggests, it enables you to instantly identify trends in your data so you will always be one step ahead of your strategies. There are a variety of trendlines that you can add to the data points in your charts to visualize various trends types. Some of them include:

• Exponential: This trendline is a curved line that is mostly used to show when data values rise or fall at increasingly higher rates.
• Linear: As its name suggests, this trendline is a straight line that is used with simple linear data sets. It usually indicates a steady growth or decrease in your data.
• Logarithmic: This trendline is a best-fit curve mostly used when the rate of change between one unit of data increases or decreases quickly and then levels out. It can be used to display both positive or negative values.
• Polynomial: This is a form of linear regression used to display data fluctuations. It is especially useful when analyzing gains and losses over larger data sets to adjust the trend to the fluctuations.

Among some of these trendline types, business intelligence software such as datapine offers a best-fit function that will analyze your data scenario and provide you with the type of trendline that better suits your needs.

e) AI alerts

Artificial Intelligence technologies are a must-have feature for any BI software worth its salt. A common use for AI in the business intelligence industry is through smart data alerts that will save users the tedious task of manually checking if anything changed in their data. By using neural networks, pattern recognition, and machine learning algorithms, the software can learn about different trends and patterns in your data and notify you as soon as a target is met or if any anomalies occur. All you need to do is set predefined parameters and an alert will be activated if something needs to be checked. These AI-based algorithms not only make businesses ’ life’s easier by removing the pains of manually checking data but also help them stay ahead of potential issues that could affect performance in the long run. 

f) Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics is one of the BI systems features that is becoming increasingly more popular as it can play a fundamental role in helping businesses optimize their operations and potential development. As its name suggests, the predictive analytics feature aims to generate forecasts about future performance. It does this by using mathematical models to analyze current and historical data and find relationships, trends, and patterns that will build accurate predictions about what could be the future development of a certain data set.  

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Although it might sound like an advanced BI feature, more and more software developers are including it in their self-service solutions, making them really easy to manage for any level of user. All you need to do is insert the desired points (as seen in the image below) and the software will automatically calculate predictions based on your instructions, no need for advanced mathematical calculations or any manual work. Using predictive solutions can enable businesses to prepare for potential issues, plan production, and optimize overall performance by getting an accurate glance into the future. 

3) Dashboards

It is no secret that the human brain processes visual information way faster than numbers or text. For this reason, visual analytics in the shape of interactive dashboards are becoming indispensable for businesses to upscale their performance. Professional dashboards gather all your most relevant KPIs into one intuitive visualization that will help you to monitor and analyze your data and extract actionable insights to ensure constant improvement. Here you will find some of the main BI tool features related to dashboard management: 

a) Built-in dashboard templates

Following the principle of accessibility and usability, another important BI software feature is dashboard templates. Rather you want to quickly generate a sales report or track the performance of your marketing campaigns, having at your fingertips interactive dashboard templates to use will make your life easier. Templates are especially useful for users that are still not comfortable with generating their own dashboards from scratch or for normal users that just need to spend more time analyzing the data than building the dashboard. 

datapine offers over 80+ professional business dashboard templates for different industries, platforms, and functions to ensure that the analysis process is as efficient as possible. Take the sales dashboard below as an example.

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b) Cross-device accessibility

Next in our rundown of BI platform features is a point related to monitoring your data in the most efficient way. The cross-device accessibility feature enables you to access your dashboards from anywhere on any device that you need. Interactive online dashboards include real-time data that keeps you updated on anything that happens in your business, once your sources are connected, you no longer need to worry about manually updating them as the tool will provide you with fresh insights as soon as new information is available.

The dashboards and reports you create will be available to you at all times, whether you are outside of the office or presenting them on a bigger screen to support a business meeting. A simple internet connection is all you need to access your data from a desktop, tablet, laptop, smartphone, or any other device that you need to. 

c) Interactive Features

The value of a BI dashboard used for online reporting lies in its interactivity, which makes the entire analysis process more efficient and accessible. Having this principle in mind, the BI software you choose to invest in should provide several interactive features such as filtering options that will allow you to visualize your data from different perspectives. This will help you avoid having the same information multiple times in the same dashboard, making your analysis process way more productive. Among some of the most useful interactive dashboard features are:

• Drill down: This feature enables you to add more variables to your charts. By simply clicking on your visualization you can drill down into a lower level of the axis to get different, more detailed insights into your data. For example, if you are looking at the performance of your social channels by country, you can simply click on one specific channel and the entire chart will be filtered based on the country-specific performance of that channel.
• Drill through: One of the dashboard design principles is to not overcrowd your reports with big charts that will take all the space. The drill through interactive feature aims to help you avoid this mistake by giving you the possibility to see additional information about a graph or a KPI on your dashboard. All you need to do is click on the specific value and the dashboard will immediately display it in a bigger size for a more detailed view without the need to be presented on the main screen.
• Click-to-filter: A well-constructed dashboard should give you the possibility to easily explore your data on one screen. The click-to-filter option helps you do just that, by utilizing the dimensions of the dashboard’s charts as a temporary filter. All you need to do is click on the desired value or graph and the entire dashboard will filter based on it, displaying new insights within seconds. For example, if you have a map chart, you can click on a specific country or region to get more detailed information about it.
• Time-interval widget: This interactive dashboard feature allows you to enhance individual time scales on different charts in your dashboards. It basically lets you choose which time interval of data is being displayed in your charts which can be date or time. This enables you to consult on different time frames to support discussions without having to filter the entire dashboard.

d) Custom design

In order to provide you with full control over your dashboards, the global style option is an invaluable feature of business intelligence tools. Global style options allow you to customize your dashboards by changing the colors, fonts, backgrounds, charts, texts, symbols, etc. so they can be aligned with your brand’s corporate image. Additionally, you use predefined dashboard themes that stick to your data story or generate your own themes that you can then easily implement into all your dashboards with just a few clicks. Tools such as datapine provide you with 35+ chart types to choose from to visualize your data in the best possible way, you can also browse our icons library and pick whichever one works best for your data story.

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4) Reporting

The next part of our list on BI software features concentrates on the reporting portion of the data analysis process. Efficient reporting has the goal of making business’s life’s easier by providing efficient solutions to generate interactive reports. Traditional means of reporting are time-consuming as they require a lot of manual work. For this reason, when investing in BI software for your company you need to make sure that the tool you choose enables you to leave the pains of manual reporting in the past, leaving you enough time to analyze and extract actionable insights to improve your business performance. Some of the main BI features for reporting include: 

a) Sharing options

Sharing your reports is one of the most critical features of business intelligence. The main purpose of modern reporting solutions is to enhance communication between teams by empowering everyone to work with data even without technical skills. Standard sharing options include manual exports and emailing reports, however, the cloud nature of self-service BI tools takes the sharing experience one step further by providing other extremely useful options such as automated reports that are sent to customized recipients or groups with specific filters, for example, sales data for a specific region. This feature is seen in the image above with datapine’s sharing capabilities.

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Other convenient sharing options provided by business intelligence tools include sharing your dashboards via a live URL that is password-protected for extra safety. This is an especially useful feature for interdisciplinary projects where teams need to work conjointly from different parts of the world as they can easily access the data, significantly enhancing collaboration. Lastly, if you need to print your weekly or monthly reports to physically share them in a meeting, they can be easily adapted to any export format such as PDF, PNG, Excel, and many more, without breaking any charts or graphs. 

b) Embedding capabilities

Embedding analytics is one of the BI trends that gain force in 2021 and will continue to grow in 2022. To put it simply, embedding analytics is a business intelligence feature that enables you to integrate an analytical software with all its attributes into your own system. Tools such as datapine, enable you to embed interactive dashboards into your own application, this way you get all the benefits of BI reporting tool without the costs and manual work of creating one of your own. Like this, you get full control over your analysis process from monitoring, to visualizing and extracting actionable insights. 

Implementing embedding analytics in your business can help you provide your employees, investors, partners, clients, or any other relevant stakeholder, an excellent reporting experience with better insights into relevant data. 

c) Client reporting

Being able to automatically generate external client reports is another one of the important features of business intelligence you should consider. As mentioned before, traditional means of reporting can take several hours or even days leaving almost no time to perform analysis or other tasks such as planning and implementing strategies. A modern BI reporting tool provides you with automated features to generate a professional client dashboard with just a few clicks. You just need to schedule your reports to be generated in a specific time frame and sent to selected recipients. Additionally, dashboards are white-labeled, meaning they can be customized to the color, logo, and font of your clients for an extra professional look. This will allow you to deliver a quality service while optimizing your internal processes for an efficient workflow. 

d) Viewing rights

Last but not least, the security and integrity of your data are one of the key features of business intelligence. Your reports contain a lot of sensitive data about your company that needs to be protected since a leak can bring bad consequences. Tools such as datapine provide you with different viewing rights so you can determine in which way your information will be viewed and interacted with by specific users. This way you get full control over how your data is being managed and increase the protection in your analysis process. There are several scenarios in which you will need to share your reports with internal and external stakeholders, here are 4 levels of viewing rights that can make sharing dashboards safer and more efficient: 

• Administrator: The admin view is the most powerful role, it should allow you to manage your reports without any limitations, be able to add other editors or viewers, and access all the BI software features in the process. 
• Viewer: As its name suggests this role is limited to viewing the dashboards and accessing the interactive features that we mentioned above. Viewers can filter the available data for a more interactive analysis process, but cannot edit anything in the report. 
• Editor: Similar to the administrator role, the editor has limited access to the business intelligence software features, can only edit dashboards that have been shared with them, and cannot edit or delete any of the current databases present in the dashboard. 
• Power viewer: Last but not least, the power viewer has access to the interactive dashboards and their filtering capabilities can access a chart library previously assigned by the admin and can edit dashboards only based on the existing charts. 

Key Takeaways From Business Intelligence Features

As we reach the end of this insightful post on the most important features of business intelligence we hope you have a better understanding of what benefits these types of solutions can bring to your business analytics. We provided you with some important numbers on how this market will keep growing in the following years, gave you a few general benefits, and a complete list of the top 17 most competitive features you should look for when investing in a BI tool for your business.  

Above all, an important takeaway is to understand that dealing with data is no longer a segregated task. Considering that 74% of employees report feeling overwhelmed when working with data, the ability to provide accessible solutions that will empower everyone to work with data in an intuitive and accessible way is an indisputable benefit. In the long run, your entire business will become data-driven setting you apart from competitors.

To summarize, here are the top 17 features of business intelligence you should know about: 

1. Data Connectors
2. Flexible Data Integration 
3. Join Data Sources
4. Drag & drop 
5. Custom fields & expressions 
6. Cross queries 
7. Trend analysis 
8. AI alerts 
9. Predictive analytics 
10. Templates 
11. Cross-device accessibility 
12. Interactive dashboard features
13. Custom design 
14. Sharing options
15. Embedding 
16. Client reporting 
17. Viewing rights 

If you want to see all these 17 features in action, take a look at this insightful video of datapine’s BI software in action:

Now it’s time to put all the knowledge you gained in action test our professional business intelligence software 14-days for free!

The post Top Business Intelligence Features To Boost Your Business Performance appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.