A powerful process for evaluation and selection of the right Business Intelligence analytics tool starts from collecting and rank BI requirements, then proceeding further to utilizing business use cases to decide on the right tool category and style.

Your company can choose the analytics tool that suits your scenarios and use cases, fits well into your budget and can be easily implemented and integrated into the technology perspective. An important measure in the evaluation of Analytics tools is to understand and realise which of the features and functions are must-haves, nice-to-haves, and will-not-use.

1) Must-haves: This classification should be clear and explicit. If the product doesn’t have a particular feature or function that your scenario requires, it’s excluded from further consideration.Typical must-have features are like:  connection and access to various databases and file types, cleaning,arranging and filtering data, drilling down from outlined to more elaborated data, a Web-based client-user interface, print and export, visualizations techniques and safety and privacy of data.

2) Nice-to-haves: As the name goes “nice-to-have” these are the features that aren’t required, but they are usually the differentiators in selecting a product.They are like add-on’s and toppings.

3) Will-not-use: Some analytics tools can have a big list of features which your organisation might never need. For such cases, do not waste time checking those aspects of tools during the evaluation and selection process.