The Evolution from Legacy to Modern BI Systems

Empowering Analytics with Modern BI Tools

With the ongoing global spike in new COVID-19 cases, evidence-based, agile business intelligence (BI) projects are becoming indispensable to business sustainability.

Consider these eye-opening stats:

• A COVID-19-related white paper by Sisense reveals “68 percent of small businesses are using analytics in their COVID-19 response.”
• In addition, 50 percent of all companies report using data more often than pre-COVID-19 times, according to the study.
• The white paper also notes 55 percent of businesses started using BI to improve efficiency.
• Forty-seven percent of those same businesses started using BI for customer support, while 45 percent deploy data to predict future outcomes.

Why are so many businesses relying on modern BI tools? Despite some gains in economic growth following the initial pandemic spike, economic experts still worry the worst may not be over.

“[There’s] the risk that there is some longer-run damage to the productive capacity of the economy and to people’s lives who have been disrupted by the pandemic,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently told CNBC.

Clearly, forward-facing businesses must leverage innovative BI tools in the “new normal” of economic uncertainty. The only way to maximize return on investment (ROI) is by identifying inefficiencies, optimizing cost efficiency, protecting assets, and maintaining investor confidence.

Navigating the Changing Landscape of Business Intelligence

Integrating BI Tools into Your Workflow

Embracing Innovation for Future Growth

Licensing Issues and Data Integrity Concerns

Security Risks in Distributed Data Warehouses

The research speaks loud and clear: Businesses must implement top-level BI tools in order to survive and thrive the coming year. But how do older legacy BI platforms stack up against modern solutions, like Tableau? As we’ll see, the success of your economic future may hang on the answer.

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Legacy vs. Modern BI: An Overview

Despite their many limitations, legacy BI systems still haunt business offices and data centers. Legacy platforms are older, clunkier, and more feeble than today’s super-charged BI systems. For example, legacy programs crank out reports at a snail’s pace—over weeks or months, instead of hours or days. How can a dynamic company expect to make nimble decisions with that level of reporting?

Conversely, modern BI tools enable self-service analytics, with no specialized programming skills needed. They deliver governed reporting and analytics in an agile and user-friendly way, which in turn supports an expanded role in terms of analytics. The result: A laser-focused peak of ROI supremacy that’s unparalleled in driving competitiveness.

Still not convinced that modern BI tools outpace legacy in every way possible? Consider these vital ROI factors. Ask yourself the following questions:

Can BI tools fuel self-service collaboration? 

Legacy systems require specialized skills when it comes to programming, often using outdated software or platforms that can’t “talk” to each other. That means a business using legacy programs must hire a programmer with narrow, specific skills. Such an employee usually can’t perform any other job functions.

By not empowering multiple users who are generalists, legacy systems stymie content sharing, making it clunky or non-existent. Exported reports remain static and unavailable for analysis in real time. That kind of time lag kills collaboration. Data becomes obsolete at the point of report generation.

With BI tools like Tableau, any team member can easily learn how to master the system without programming experience. This allows content creators to collaborate like the pros they are. Plus, they can easily develop and validate action-facing reports and data analysis. Your team can do more with less—less time and less cost. Your ROI is looking strong!

Can BI Tools be more seamless?

A legacy BI platform is like the fabled Tower of Babel: a hodgepodge of data systems all speaking different languages in a programming pandemonium. By relying on such a baffling patchwork of often outdated systems, legacy data tools also create licensing issues. Who knows which system has correct and updated licensing in place? Your business can’t afford such a costly mistake.

In addition, legacy systems are often distributed across several data warehouses, resulting in a minefield of potential security breaches. Your organization also can’t afford the risks of such a scattered data environment.

Tableau is enterprise-ready—the entire bundle in a neat package—leveraging existing technology into a seamless, on-site, or cloud-based environment.

Can BI Tools be more user-friendly?

Legacy systems often confuse users with a puzzling knowledge base, sometimes with contradictory information. When your team wastes time trying to navigate a system that won’t ”play nice,” your ROI suffers.

With BI tools like Tableau, teams can cross-train across the entire platform. Go team! Plus, users can easily navigate the process using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

Tableau: The ROI Champ

If you’re not convinced by now that Tableau is the reigning champion for BI-tool ROI, consider these facts. A Forrester report examined the effectiveness of Tableau over a diverse client base. The report shows the following:

• A 127 percent ROI using Tableau’s BI products
• A 400 percent increase in standardized reports
• An 87.5 percent reduction in report creation times
• Reduced report distribution, storage, and duplication costs, plus the simplified publishing of reports

In addition, the report notes that adoption of Tableau incurs no training costs and that it frees up BI analysts to perform higher-value tasks.

In a field of BI tools, Tableau stands out in its class, taking ROI to new heights. Better yet, combine Tableau with our Pixel Perfect extension and quickly create print-ready reports at a click.