Is Excel the Next Killer Business Intelligence Application?

Love it or hate it, export to Excel is still the most specified requirement in contemporary analytic tool selections, despite all the advances in business intelligence (BI) technologies. Excel is comfortable, flexible and with the new Microsoft Office 365 Excel Power BI add-ins (Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power Map), it's growing to become exponentially more powerful—pun intended. With the latest Microsoft strategy shift of embedding self-service BI applications right within Excel.

Excel in the BI World

Business users may love Excel, but in the professional BI world, it carries emotional baggage. Countless data warehouses and reporting applications have been built with the intent of removing Excel risks and dreaded "spreadmarts." Excel has been blamed for high profile analytic disasters such as JPMorgan's $6 billion trading loss. Keep in mind, people make mistakes using many tools—not just Excel—yet Excel remains an extremely popular attack target.

Quite a few data discovery and BI vendors advertise anti-Excel messaging in one way, shape, or form. Since Excel is where most analytic tasks are performed today, if Microsoft makes the right investment decisions and quickly executes, popular data discovery applications are most at-risk and they know it. Reviewing an admittedly subjective list of top requested data discovery tool capabilities, Excel Power BI already arguably meets or exceeds more than half of them and rapid releases new features monthly.

Most Common Data Discovery Tool Requirements*

Data discovery requirements typically are business user driven requirements (a.k.a. the masses). If Excel can meet most data discovery requirements, why would you buy another stand-alone tool?    

5 reasons to implement Mobile Business Intelligence

Shifting work environments and new technologies driving enterprise mobility

According to the International Data Corporation, nearly one billion smart connected devices – PCs, media tablets, and smartphones – were shipped in 2011. That figure is predicted to top 1.1 billion in 2012, with shipments expected to double 2011’s tally and reach 1.84 billion units by 2016, as businesses of all shapes and sizes around the world show a nearly insatiable appetite for smart connected devices. Most significantly, IDC predicts that the number of mobile devices, principally smartphones in conjunction with tablets, are set to dwarf the number of PCs – outnumbering them by more than five to one. And, on the back of that growth, global internet users will double between now and 2015, with mobile users accounting for around 80 percent of consumption.

Enterprise mobility driving Mobile BI

1. Faster decision-making
Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise – found that companies with Mobile BI could make critical business decisions six times faster than organizations without a mobile platform for reporting and analytics. The capacity to quickly identify trends, patterns and emergent opportunities (or threats) produces competitive advantage.

2. Better decision-making
Equipping mobile decision-makers with up-to-date fact-based information not only improves the speed with which information is transmitted and decisions are made, but the capacity for on-the-go personnel to improve the quality of their decision-making.

a. Collaboration
Mobile BI users can share reports, information and insight relating to BI content – with other authorized users – across devices and platforms to collectively solve problems and decide on the best course of action. Sharing new ideas and fresh perspectives creates a more effective and efficient decision-making process. Users are able to utilize the knowledge gained through reporting and analytics more efficiently and effectively to make better, faster decisions. For example, sales executives affected by a delayed shipment could email the stock level report to the marketing manager. Notifying the marketing team about the delay allows them to adjust the launch of their advertising campaign accordingly. Likewise, the CEO of Some Firm could set the agenda for 9 am AGM by commenting on or annotating a report and distributing it to the rest of the executive team during his morning commute.

3. Enhanced productivity
Mobile BI empowers decision-makers across all industry types and functional roles to utilize time more effectively and reduce inefficiencies: Executives can transform the airport lounge into strategic workshops, sales personnel can convert a prospect’s conference room into the perfect pitching environment, and line managers can match strategy with output on the shop floor.

4. Monitor business performance at a glance 
Mobile dashboards make monitoring KPIs easy, and ensures that executives always have their fingers firmly on the pulse of the business.  

5. Improved customer satisfaction 
Field personnel need to have an accurate understanding of their organization’s customer-base to do their job effectively. Pro-active alerts and access to both real-time and historical data, detailing current customer needs and past behaviors, will lead to increased efficiency and productivity ‘in the field’, and ultimately enhanced customer satisfaction.