Despite the last decade’s investment in modernizing business intelligence (BI) technology, data teams are still working in silos, getting bogged down by fragmented, reactive work. Accenture research shows that only one in five organizations can unlock the intrinsic value of their data.
The writing on the wall is clear: Traditional BI tools don’t cut it. You need modern BI solutions that help you go from insight to action—without all the current plumbing and processes legacy tools require.
But how do you select the right BI solution for your business? And how do you make data accessible so that even frontline workers can analyze their data in real time?
Let’s unpack the hidden costs of using legacy BI tools and see how modern BI solutions can empower users to drive new business outcomes. Understanding these considerations will surely help you spark your own data renaissance.
Table of contents:
The hidden costs of using traditional BI
Static dashboards are dead. Research shows that 92% of data teams spend time performing operational tasks outside of their roles because of deficiencies in legacy BI. This operational work mostly includes manually processing data, fulfilling ad-hoc requests, or modeling large datasets.
Additionally, business users might wait days and even weeks for their IT teams to generate reports. Due to these delays in decision-making, their businesses miss out on growth opportunities and customer experience suffers. Here are some of the ways traditional BI software can kill the growth of your business:
1. Static dashboards and reporting
With legacy BI, your data team spends months gathering data, building models, and creating static dashboards, only to find their hard work is no longer relevant. These efforts fail because static dashboards simply cannot match the speed and pace of innovation your team needs. Decision-makers don’t need data prepared months ago. Instead, they need a solution that continuously pumps real-time insights to support data-driven decisions.
Moreover, most desktop dashboard development activities are performed in silos, hindering analyst collaboration with business stakeholders. This lack of two-way communication prevents IT teams from delivering dashboards that provide tangible business value.
2. Antiquated data management processes
Legacy BI solutions often struggle when tasked with processing large data volumes. And it’s not just data volumes that can cause bottlenecks, there’s significant complexity involved in managing data varieties—structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. Meanwhile, data teams still have to spend a great deal of time in metadata management and data hierarchies. With so much operational overhead, data teams have little bandwidth to focus on value-added initiatives.
3. Limited user accessibility
Traditional BI often features clunky interfaces and requires complex SQL and Python queries, limiting its use to IT and data professionals. As a result, business users have restricted or no access to data and must rely on IT teams for every answer and report. And even after receiving an answer, what if they have follow-up questions or need to pivot their analysis? They must reach out repeatedly to the IT support team and again wait for days.
Furthermore, lack of interactivity and discoverability restricts users’ understanding of why, where, and when data changes happened, leading to more ambiguity in decision-making.
Today’s AI-powered, multi-experience analytics has ushered in a new era of decision-making, making it easier than ever to unlock insights trapped in your cloud data warehouse. Here’s how modern BI is helping businesses unlock insights faster than ever:
Self-service analytics
One of the most significant advancements in modern BI is the democratization of data. Today’s self-service analytics tools like ThoughtSpot offer a customer-grade experience that makes data exploration and analysis accessible for everyone on the team—business users welcome.
By leveraging ThoughtSpot’s GenAI-powered search, users can easily access real-time data and create their own dashboards and reports, eliminating reliance on data teams. Your team also can ask questions about its business data and receive instant insights without navigating complex interfaces. This positive user experience leads to higher adoption rates and engagement.
Here’s how ThoughtSpot’s AI-driven search and consumer-grade UX make it easy for business users to find insights:
Cloud-based ecosystem
Today’s data is increasingly distributed, disparate, and diverse. This is why data leaders seek a BI solution that seamlessly integrates with their existing cloud ecosystems and supports a broad range of data use cases. With flexible deployment and robust integrations, data teams can analyze large datasets without losing time or performance. For instance, using modern BI solutions like ThoughtSpot, you can easily comb through billions of data rows and execute dozens of insights-detection algorithms—all within seconds.
Here’s how ThoughtSpot connects with Snowflake and empowers businesses to unlock the true value of their data using natural language search and AI-powered insights:
Augmented analysis
While traditional BI has always focused on descriptive analytics, modern BI supports real-time data processing and predictive analytics. These solutions harness the power of LLMs to automatically generate real-time insights, helping you identify important trends or anomalies in your dataset. Using such advanced analytics features also empowers organizations to anticipate trends, optimize processes, and identify potential risks before they arise, facilitating more proactive decision-making.
See in action how ThoughtSpot’s SpotIQ utilizes AI and machine learning to help you forecast trends or perform a one-click analysis to uncover driving factors behind key metrics:
Data storytelling and conversational interfaces
The way we are consuming data is changing. Instead of viewing one-dimensional charts and graphs, we’ve come to expect more personalized, conversational data experiences. With conversational BI, you can engage with contextual data and drill down to the point of granularity via natural language to understand why changes are occurring in your data. Armed with such insights, you can create great data stories that convey complex data concepts to stakeholders and drive home your point.
For instance, using ThoughtSpot’s natural language search, you can create Liveboards that provide real-time data updates with interactive elements such as drill-downs, filters, and tooltips, allowing you to dynamically explore data. The visualizations make it clear when there’s a change occurring in trajectories, giving the audience sufficient context to understand the broader narrative.
Collaboration and sharing
Data quality, trust, and transparency are three important pillars of modern BI. But when proper collaboration between data and business teams doesn’t happen, it’s natural for misunderstandings to occur. That’s why Gartner emphasizes the need for greater collaboration and sharing features, allowing users to work simultaneously on worksheets and ensure that the project aligns with business goals. This two-way communication also fosters a culture of data-driven decision-making across the organization, promoting transparency and alignment.
For instance, analysts using ThoughtSpot can leverage features such as Notes to collaborate and share important takeaways with stakeholders.
💡Pro tip: The better your communication, the better the insights. Find tips for deeper collaboration in our Context is Gold whitepaper.
While the Gartner 2023 Magic Quadrant for Data Analytics and BI emphasized caution regarding AI-powered analytics, the 2024 report recognized it as a game-changer. However, without the right analytics partner, your AI investments could easily turn into a backlog of technical debt.
Recognized as a leader in the BI space, ThoughtSpot’s AI-Powered Analytics empowers every person in your organization to ask and answer data questions, find actionable insights, and use this intelligence to make informed decisions. Even the world’s most innovative companies like HP, Chik-A-fil, Odido, and more trust ThoughtSpot as their go-to BI solution to turn data into insights.
Here’s how ThoughtSpot empowers users with powerful data experiences:
AI-powered natural language search allows users to interact with data and ask questions until they uncover insights that add real business value.
Interactive, verifiable, personalized Liveboards that help you stay on top of changes in your business
AI-assisted data modeling and exploration to simplify complex processing tasks for the data team
AI-augmented analysis of KPIs and charts through SpotIQ, including one-click change analysis and AI highlights
Continuous monitoring of key business metrics, including notifications when your data requires attention
Drill-anywhere visualizations that allow you to dig deep into metrics without losing context
Granular user access and controls built-in your workflows
Your operational databases hold a wealth of data just waiting to be transformed into actionable insights. With modern BI tools like ThoughtSpot, it’s easier than ever to unlock the full value of your data.
Now it's up to you to embrace an AI-driven future–take a product tour today.
