10 warning signs your BI needs an overhaul
Like a car, outdated business intelligence gives off warning signs. Ignore them and you'll waste time, hurt decisions, and leave value in your data untapped. This paper walks through ten signs to watch for, then lays out the essential features to demand in whatever you replace it with.
Ten symptoms, then the cure
Introduction
When you own a car, you learn that cars give warning signs in a variety of ways. Sometimes a light appears on your dashboard. Sometimes the engine starts idling roughly. Or maybe the brakes start squeaking one day.
When those warning signs appear, what do you do? Do you ignore them and hope they go away? Or do you take the car to a mechanic and get it fixed? You get it fixed, of course. Ignoring the warning signs will eventually leave you stranded by the side of the road.
The analogy applies perfectly to business intelligence. Every day, companies run BI tools and processes that need replacing. In some cases, faulty BI processes slow them down. In others, outdated BI tools waste time and keep them from capitalizing on their data.
The good news: Just like a car, outdated BI displays warning signs. If you pay attention, those signs can save you from larger problems down the road. The problem is that many companies either ignore them or don't recognize them at all.
So what are the warning signs of bad BI? This paper answers that question in two parts. First, the ten warning signs themselves. Then, because spotting the problem is only half the job, a full breakdown of the features to look for in whatever you replace it with.
Creating reports is time-consuming
If reports take days to build, they're outdated before anyone reads them.
We live in an increasingly data-driven world. Your ability to turn data into meaningful management information plays a larger role in your business than ever before.
The problem: Reporting is still a time-consuming process in many businesses. Teams spend days formatting data and creating the reports they need. The result: Reports are already outdated by the time they're created.
A slow reporting process touches every part of the business. Users wait around for information. Decisions suffer because the data isn't available when the question comes up.
The question to ask: How long does this process take in your business? If the answer is anything more than "minutes or hours," that's a warning sign. It might be time to replace your BI solution or change your reporting process.
Probably the biggest warning sign is based on the amount of time being spent "manually" preparing reports or charts. If it's time consuming or labor intensive to get the information you need, for example, if someone spends the best part of a week at the end of each month preparing reports, consolidating multiple spreadsheets, different data sources etc., then this is a big fat warning sign.
Dr. Alan McCabe, Deputy Chief Operating Officer at Software GroupBI still runs through a single department
When every report request funnels through IT, everyone loses time.
A similar problem we see far too often: BI runs through a single department, usually IT. In the past, that made sense. Creating BI applications required real technical skill, and users couldn't do it on their own.
These days, that's no longer the case. With self-service BI options widely available, there's no reason for a single department to handle all reporting.
Yet it still happens in many businesses, and it wastes time for everyone involved. End users wait around for the reports they need. The IT department squeezes reporting requests into an already busy schedule, which pulls them away from mission-critical projects.
The question to ask: Does BI still run through a single department in your business? If so, dig into why. Is it habit, or is your existing BI solution too difficult for end users? If it's the tool, it's time to look for another one.
People have stopped asking new questions
Good BI promotes questions. Bad BI makes the questions stop.
As data keeps growing, a concept has taken hold: The data-driven business. What does that actually mean? A data-driven company isn't one that simply collects data and glances at it from time to time. It's one that uses data to drive the decision-making process. Before making a decision, they analyze the relevant data and let the conclusions drive the call.
This goes far beyond executive-level decisions. It extends across the business. Employees at every level analyze and learn from the data available to them.
Here's one huge advantage of a good BI solution: It promotes questions. Because data is easy to analyze, users start asking, and answering, new questions about the business. That's how a data-driven culture forms.
The opposite is also true. If users have no easy way to analyze data, the conversation changes. It stops being about the data and starts being about the tool.
If most of the conversations about BI are about how expensive and slow it is, or how unresponsive IT is, and nobody is asking for new questions to be answered, you are in trouble.
Gene Connolly, President and Principal Consultant at Connolly Consultants LLCIt's too complex for end users
You can deploy the perfect BI solution. You can't force users to adopt it.
There's an old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. The same goes for BI. You can deploy the perfect solution, but you can't force users to adopt the tool.
The fact is, BI adoption rates among employees remain stubbornly low. Surveys over the years have put adoption at only a fraction of the workforce, with some estimates as low as roughly one in five employees.
That creates problems for everyone. If users aren't using the self-service tools you've provided, the pressure lands back on IT. Reporting drifts back to the old methods, where every request goes through the IT department, and the time savings you bought the tool for never materialize.
Why is adoption so low? The reasons vary, but it usually boils down to one common problem: Many "self-service" BI tools are too technical for the average user.
Non-technical business users are just not comfortable with complex IT implementation requirements for BI infrastructure such as Data Warehouse, and are not interested in learning advanced technical skills such as programming in order to build their analysis.
Ben Tai, CEO of DrivenBIThe knock-on effect is worse than wasted licenses. When business users can't get timely access to data through the approved tool, they go back to demanding heavy IT support, which delays more critical work and creates tension between the business and IT. Or they bypass IT altogether and find their own tools.
You have no built-in drill-down capabilities
Without drill-down, your BI gives you the "what" but never the "why."
Your BI solution must let you explore your data as needed. It should start you off with a high-level view, then let you drill deeper, all the way down to the most minute details.
For instance, if your dashboard displays product returns, it should also let the user drill down and see where products are being returned, the reasons for each return, and any other pertinent information.
Not every BI solution offers this. Some display the data but provide no way to dig deeper. Without that capability, your BI can tell you something is wrong but never help you understand why, and that's where most of the value lives.
In a scenario where your BI tools allow you to identify a problem, for example a region where your staff performance is abnormally low, users should be able to immediately "drill down" and look at the details that contribute to that region. If users are unable to drill down and instead have to access another report, or worse, another system, then the odds of them doing so and quickly implementing solutions drop dramatically.
Dr. Alan McCabe, Deputy Chief Operating Officer at Software GroupYou can't identify who "owns" BI
Without a clear owner, even a good BI solution stagnates.
It's a common problem: Many people get involved during the implementation phase of a BI solution. But after rollout, no one owns it. Everyone assumes another department is in charge. IT thinks the business owns it, while the business thinks IT owns it.
Why is that a problem? Without clear ownership, the BI solution stagnates. It doesn't improve. Adoption declines. The BI project as a whole quietly fails.
This one doesn't necessarily mean you need a new tool. It's a call for an overhauled BI process. If you want to get the most out of your BI solution, you need a clear owner who is accountable for making it succeed.
IT put it in because they thought they should, but doesn't have a business strategy for BI. No one outside of IT has a BI strategy, and thinks IT should. You built it, but they didn't come. Time to reboot and get the basics in place regarding accountability and a strategy to generate measurable business value with a BI investment.
Gene Connolly, President and Principal Consultant at Connolly Consultants LLCGetting an executive dashboard is a "big deal"
How fast can you deliver a dashboard when an executive asks? The answer is very telling.
As data volumes rise, dashboard adoption has skyrocketed. More and more companies rely on dashboards to make sense of their data, hoping to turn mountains of it into actionable insight.
A good dashboard puts key performance indicators at your executives' fingertips. It provides a business-health overview at a glance and helps you catch problems before they get out of hand.
The problem: Many BI tools still struggle here. Creating an executive dashboard is a "big deal," a project with custom logic and engineering behind it.
Ask yourself: If an executive requests a dashboard today, how quickly can you deliver it? If creating a simple dashboard is a complicated process, that's a glaring sign you need better BI.
There was a time when BI teams struggled to get information to executives in the form they wanted. Creating dashboards often required custom logic and engineering. Updating those dashboards frequently was often impossible or too expensive. Modern BI tools are built with the assumption that fast data stores exist and business teams want access at all times, including while mobile.
Dan Mallinger, Principal Data Scientist at Think Big AnalyticsYour BI relies on spreadsheets
Excel is still the most common "BI tool" in business. That's the problem.
Unfortunately, the spreadsheet is still the most commonly used "BI tool" in businesses today. What's so wrong with that? Three things:
- It's inefficient: Pulling data out of your system and then formatting and manipulating it is time-consuming, often requiring hours or even days of work. A true BI tool puts the data at your fingertips, giving you instant access without the busywork.
- It's not secure: With a spreadsheet, you can't control user access. You can't control who shares it with whom. You don't know how many people have edited a single document, how many versions exist, or which one is current. Do you want your business data floating around in files completely outside your control?
- It leads to data errors: The more people who touch a spreadsheet, the greater the chance of mistakes. Researchers who audit real-world spreadsheets routinely find significant errors in the large majority of them. Do you want to base business decisions on a file an unknown number of users could have edited?
If your BI processes rely heavily on spreadsheets, you're asking for problems. It's time to overhaul those processes.
Business intelligence today has evolved far beyond electronic spreadsheets which are now half-a-century old. Spreadsheets lack integrity, consistency, security, and the ability to provide real-time up-to-date data.
Brian Kelley, CIO of Portage CountyManual processes drive your BI
If someone consolidates data by hand before every report, automation is overdue.
BI has made great strides in automation over the years. Even so, manual work remains one of the biggest barriers to successful BI efforts. Far too many organizations still lean on manual processes in their BI strategy.
Here's how it usually looks. Most data isn't formatted correctly for use with a BI tool. Worse, data typically lives in multiple systems and applications across the business, and it's formatted differently in each one.
Many businesses assume they can drop a BI tool on top of their existing systems and start building reports. It's not that easy. With data living in different places and different formats, you need a way to consolidate it, typically a data warehouse fed by an ETL process. Businesses without an automated answer here end up consolidating data by hand, outside the BI tool, wasting hours every cycle.
The direction of travel makes this worse, not better. Data sources keep multiplying, and the business needs to make sense of them faster than ever. From data gathering to formatting, automation is now table stakes.
Business intelligence technology of the 21st century no longer requires manual data entry and manipulation from disparate systems and paper reports.
Brian Kelley, CIO of Portage CountyIt doesn't deliver current data
If you're always reviewing last month, you're using reporting, not business intelligence.
Business intelligence falls into four categories, in rising order of sophistication:
- Descriptive analytics: Tells you what happened in the past. It helps you understand data over the last day, week, month, or year, and make decisions based on that history. The vast majority of BI in use today stops here.
- Real-time analytics: Lets you monitor business health with up-to-the-minute data, so you can react to what's happening now.
- Predictive analytics: Analyzes past data and predicts future outcomes based on it.
- Prescriptive analytics: Goes one step further. It not only predicts outcomes, it recommends what to do about them. With AI features now standard in modern analytics tools, predictive and prescriptive capabilities are moving from luxury to expectation.
The problem: Many BI tools only cover the first category. They tell you what happened in the past, and nothing more. Those limits hold your business back, and they should be a glaring sign that you need better BI.
If you are reviewing scorecards on a weekly or monthly basis, and asking "What we should have done?" or "How can we go back and fix this problem?"; these are dead giveaways you're not on the front lines of what Business Intelligence is today. BI is meant to help you make better decisions now, this minute. If you can't immediately react to what your information is telling you, you are simply using Reporting, not Business Intelligence.
Eric Mauch, Partner at Razor Consulting SolutionsWhat good BI looks like
If the signs above sound familiar, here's the other half of the job: Knowing what to demand in a replacement. BI solutions come in all shapes and sizes. Some emphasize architecture, others tout a flashy interface. Some cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, others cost hundreds. The essential features of a good BI solution fall into four groups.
Foundation features
Open architecture
Widely ignored, yet one of the most critical aspects of BI. Software built on open architecture integrates better with other platforms and doesn't tie your company to any single platform or vendor. Always choose the open solution.
Wide database support
Modern BI must support any database, and build applications that pull from multiple data sources at once. Even if you use one database today, broad support keeps your options open as new databases appear.
Real-time data
Some BI software delivers day-old or week-old data. Good BI delivers real-time data straight from your database, because decisions are only as current as the data behind them.
Self-service capabilities
End users create their own BI and reporting applications without waiting on IT. When IT can't deliver the applications users need, users bypass IT altogether, so the approved tool has to be the easy path.
Application importing
Pull charts and data from existing applications into a new BI application instead of re-creating them each time. A flexibility feature that saves real build time.
Mobile support
A single BI application must provide a native experience on every device, desktop, tablet, and phone, without separate builds. Executives check KPIs from wherever they are, not just their desks.
Data-mart and warehouse support
Pull data out of the transactional systems that run the business and into a single location built for ad-hoc reporting, so users analyze freely without touching operational systems.
Operational reporting
Scheduled, detailed reports, often run nightly and delivered by email, that support day-to-day operations. Good BI provides ad-hoc, operational, what-if, mobile, and dashboard reporting from one code base, not as separately priced modules.
Security and control
Application-level security
Control BI application access per user or per role, typically through a role-based menu. Your CEO might see every application while HR sees only HR reports.
Row-level (multi-tenant) security
Control data access within one application at the row level. Build one sales report where each salesperson sees only their own figures, instead of building separate applications for every user.
Single sign-on
Users log in once and reach every authorized application. Fewer passwords to remember, fewer "forgotten password" tickets, and no login prompts between applications.
User privilege parameters
Personalize features and security per user or role: Control look and feel, show or hide options, and limit capabilities. For example, only authorized users even see the "export to spreadsheet" option on a pivot table.
Flexible authentication
Authenticate applications against whatever sources you already use, rather than changing your methods or maintaining yet another user table.
User-specific data sources
Like row-level security at the database level: One application that reaches different databases depending on who's using it. Invaluable after a merger, when different user groups need different data stores behind the same apps.
Activity auditing
Log when users sign in, which applications they access, and when they sign off. It supports security monitoring, and it also shows you which BI applications actually get used.
Must-have applications
Ad-hoc reports
Users select the data elements they want at run-time, then export or email the result straight from the browser. Simple reporting in the users' hands, and the reporting burden off IT's plate.
Ranking reports
Variable rankings across multiple dimensions with criteria set at run-time: Your top 25 customers last year, or your bottom 5 salespeople last month, in seconds.
Executive dashboards
A real-time view of the business in easy-to-read graphs, customized to each executive's role. The CEO watches revenue trends; the service manager watches resolution times.
Interactive reports
Instant access to a wide range of business data in one place, starting with the high-level view and drilling down to the smallest detail. Power, ease of use, and flexibility in one application.
Pivot tables / OLAP
Automatically extract, organize, and summarize data for comparisons and trend-spotting. One pivot table lets you examine nearly any aspect of your data and surface details hiding in the volume.
What-if analysis
Assess potential changes before you make them. What if you raised prices 10%? Lowered price but increased quantity? Model the risks and rewards before committing.
Geospatial and mapping
Display geographical data on a map instead of in tables. One glance shows which sales regions are performing and which need help.
Advanced capabilities
Intelligent alerts
Automatically send an email or text to the right person when data crosses a pre-defined threshold: A canceled account, an abnormal sales number. Alerts turn BI from a static report into a proactive signal.
Collaboration
Commenting and discussion inside the BI application itself, so users share ideas and flag trends where the data lives instead of mass-emailing screenshots.
White labeling
Customize the BI software to match the look and feel of your existing systems. A consistent interface improves adoption, because you're bringing BI to the users rather than forcing them into a new system.
Open integration
Pull data from your database, cloud services, email, the web, and more into one view. If sales fall sharply on one day, outside signals like product feedback may explain why.
Deploy anywhere
Applications that run on-premise or in the cloud, and can move between them. Whatever your infrastructure plans, your BI applications shouldn't be the thing holding you back.
A development platform underneath
One big reason BI software fails: It can't adapt to changing requirements. BI built on a development platform lets you customize the package and create new application types as needs change.
Internal and external reporting
Most BI handles internal reporting only. If you ever need to offer reports to customers or partners, you'll want external-facing capability, with the SSO and multi-tenant security to support it, baked in rather than sold as an extra module.
Built-in ETL
Extract data from multiple systems, transform it into a single format, and load it into a target database, as a built-in feature rather than a costly add-on. As data demands grow, combined-source reporting only gets more important.
Summary
Many companies are stuck with BI tools and practices that are in desperate need of replacement. They waste precious time, harm decision-making, and keep the business from taking advantage of its own data.
How do you know if that's you? Outdated BI displays warning signs. To recap the ten covered in this paper: Creating reports is time-consuming, BI still runs through a single department, people have stopped asking new questions, it's too complex for end users, there's no built-in drill-down, no one owns BI, getting an executive dashboard is a big deal, your BI relies on spreadsheets, manual processes drive it, and it doesn't deliver current data.
Out of those ten, how many do you notice in your company? If it's more than one, you're not alone. Many companies are in the same boat. The big question is what you're going to do about it. Start by putting any tool you're considering, including the one you have now, up against the four groups of essential features above: Foundation, security and control, must-have applications, and advanced capabilities.
Remember, just like with a car, ignoring the warning signs won't make them go away.
White paper updated July 2026
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