BI Reporting:

Reporting with business intelligence (BI) used to require extensive data modeling and deep SQL knowledge in
order to find insights. Modern BI reporting is thankfully much simpler.
Business intelligence reporting is the act of visualizing your data in the form of reports and dashboards to make
better decisions. Ten years ago, going through this process was a daunting prospect. But with today’s
technology, you can break down the process of BI reporting into simple component steps.
If you’re starting from scratch, there are eight steps to modern BI reporting you need to go through. If you
already have a BI platform, you can skip on down to step #/4. Everyone else: get your pens and notebooks
ready.

1. Assess Your Data Maturity

 As your business grows and/or shifts to the cloud, there are four stages of maturity your data passes
through. Understanding which stage you’re at will help you understand how to address your specific
needs when it comes to BI reporting.
 we recognized four distinct stages of data sophistication that successful companies go through. These
stages happen to be tied to a new piece of the data stack that is needed at each stage, and so we have
named these stages after those pieces.

1. Source
2. Lake
3. Warehouse
4. Mart

Stage 1: Source Data (Scattered)

 When you start working with data, you may only have a few sources of interest. Two common early
sources are Google Analytics and your application data in whatever PostgreSQL or MySQL database
your product runs on.
 If only a few people at your company need to work with these sources, you might set them up with
direct access; it’s more simple and agile for them to just work with the data directly.
 The source data stage is when your data is scattered among a couple of individual sources, like Google
Analytics, Salesforce, and an individual database or two.
 At this stage, when it comes to BI reporting, the bulk of the work has to do with wrangling your
disparate data sources. You’re forced to conduct analysis in silos (e.g. within Salesforce alone) without
 an easy way to combine that data with other source data besides dumping it all into Google Sheets,
which can turn into a silo of its own.

Stage 2: Lake (Centralized and Unstructured)

 The data lake stage is when you first start combining data across sources (i.e., blending data) into a
central spot where it all exists together, usually in an unstructured way.
 To do BI reporting at the lake stage, you’ll need to do some preliminary transformations, like column
selection or hashing out personally identifiable information , to make sure all your data can work
together.
 Light transformation of the data before loading the data into the lake might still be necessary:
1. Column Selection: Select the data that really matters. For example, not everything in Salesforce
needs to be synced.
2. Privacy reasons: for example, filtering out columns that contain PII (personally identifiable
information). Instead of filtering, you might want to hash PII data so they can be used for your
analytics.
 As you start to rely on more data sources, and more frequently need to blend your data, you’ll want to
build out a Data Lake—a spot for all of your data to exist together in a unified, performant source.

 Especially when you need to work with data from applications like Salesforce, Hubspot, Jira, and
Zendesk, you’ll want to create a single home for this data so you can access all of it together and with a
single SQL syntax, rather than many different APIs.
Stage 3: Warehouse (Centralized and Structured)
 In the Lake stage, as you bring in more people to work with the data, you have to explain to them the
oddities of each schema, what data is where, and what special criteria you need to filter by in each of
the tables to get the proper results. This becomes a lot of work, and will leave you frequently fighting
integrity issues.
 Eventually, you’ll want to start cleaning your data into a single, clean source of truth.
 The data warehouse stage is when you structure your centralized data in a way that makes it easier to
use across your organization.
 BI reporting at the warehouse stage is a breeze (with the right BI platform, which we’ll get into later),
and most of your work will be querying and visualizing data.

Stage 4: Mart (Centralized, Structured, and Specialized)

 The data mart stage is when teams across your organization need specialized access to only certain
sections of your structured data.
 BI reporting at the data mart stage is also fairly simple but should be focused on empowering non-
technical users to create reports or dashboards on their own.
  When you have clean data and a good BI product on top of it, you should start noticing that many
people within your company are able to answer their own questions, and more and more people are
getting involved. your company is getting increasingly informed, and the business and productivity
results should be showing.
 There’s a lot of nuance we’re glossing over here. The important thing is to recognize which stage your
business currently fits within and use that knowledge to help you select the right BI reporting platform.

2. Choose Your BI Platform

To do BI reporting, you need a (you guessed it) BI platform. A good BI platform fulfills three roles, each of
which will help you through the four stages of cloud data maturity. When implemented well, modern business
intelligence platforms make your company’s data usable. Utilizing data more effectively has always been the
core purpose of business intelligence, but BI platforms make this process much more efficient, resulting in a
totally new relationship with data.
Choose your BI platform based on how well it:

Gathers Data

Whether it’s a set of sources, a lake, or a warehouse, your BI platform should be able to ingest all the data you
need. The ability to gather all your data is particularly useful for businesses at stage 1, where your data is
scattered among a couple of disparate tools. Make sure your BI platform will allow you to blend your
data together (i.e., combine it all) into a more cohesive dataset.

Helps You Understand Data

Your BI platform should provide the ability to query your data using SQL. The easier the BI platform makes it to
work with SQL, the better. Easy-to-use query builders, like visual query builders, are particularly useful for
businesses in stages 2–4. Businesses at theses stages have a more sophisticated data infrastructure and want
more of their employees to leverage it. Yes, we’re biased, but a good example of a BI platform making it easy
to understand your data is Visual SQL, which we’ll dive into a little later.

Visualizes Data

Finally, your BI platform should have an easy way to turn your queried data into reports and dashboards that
you can then share and use for decision-making. The ability to visualize data in order to help you make better
decisions is a core function for every BI platform and helps businesses of all cloud data maturity stages.
Again, we’re just breezing through the core concepts. We’ve written extensively on how to choose a BI
platform; what’s to take away from here are the core functions of BI platforms that impact your BI reporting
process.

3. Understand the Difference Between Reports and Dashboards

BI reporting encompasses two different types of visualizations: reports and dashboards. There’s a small but
important difference between the two, and you need to understand this difference to do the right type of
reporting.
Reports are static and use historical data to predict the future. The purpose of a report is to provide an in-
depth analysis of events that have passed in order to inform decision-making and project trends. Because of
this more comprehensive nature, reports tend to be more work and are created at regular intervals, like weekly,
monthly, quarterly, etc.
Dashboards are real-time and often interactive, focusing on in-the-moment decision-making. The purpose of a
dashboard is to provide a pulse check on how certain metrics are performing. Dashboards usually have some
up-front setup time involved but take care of themselves from there on out, with the occasional tweak here and
there.
For the purposes of this article, the act of “business intelligence reporting” will describe the process of creating
both reports and dashboards because they both visualize data to inform decision-making. As we’ll get into with
step #5, knowing this difference helps you hone in on the purpose of your BI reporting.
4. Connect Your Sources

Once you’ve chosen and set up your BI platform, it’s time to hook up your data. There are two overall ways to
connect your data to your BI platform:

Direct Connection

BI platforms have proprietary connections that do most of the work for you. All you have to do is provide login
details and possibly a special key for each data source. A good initial marker for the quality of a BI platform
is its library of connections

SSH Tunnel

For everything else, you can have your developers set up an SSH tunnel to securely connect your data
source/lake/warehouse to your BI platform. This more technical option is best for businesses that have their
databases on private connections or have firewall considerations to take into account.

5. Set Your Goal and Audience

Once you have your data connected to your BI platform, you need to clearly define the purpose of your BI
reporting. BI visualizations need to support decision-making. Set your audience according to your answers to
these questions:

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

You may just want to slap together a quick ad hoc visualization to illustrate a concept. Or maybe you need to
put some “oomph” behind a comprehensive report you’ve been planning for weeks. Either way, a clearly
defined goal behind your visualization will keep you on track and keep your work from ballooning on you.

Who Is the Audience?

Busy business leaders have a lot on their plate and may just need an executive summary. Individual
contributors, on the other hand, may want to scrutinize and dive deep. Or vice versa. It all depends on who
your audience is, so make sure you’re tailoring every aspect of your BI reporting to their needs.

Why Do They Need Data?

In other words, what decision is your audience making that needs more supporting data? Think through how
they’re going to use this data and when they’ll use it. Maybe they need a static, one-time report. Or they might
need a real-time dashboard they can check throughout the day. Keep this purpose front and center in your
mind as you create your visualizations.

6. Query Your Data

Next, it’s time to pull in the data you need using queries. The data you use should be determined by your goal
and audience.
You write queries with SQL, a coding language designed to interface with databases and data warehouses.
Queries select the ranges of data you’d like to compare and allow you to join them for easier comparison. For
instance, you can pull marketing qualified leads from one source, like HubSpot, and compare them
to advertising spend from Facebook.

7. Visualize Your Data

Now comes the fun part: creating the charts. In Chartio, once you’ve queried your data (in what we call the
“Pipeline”), your results will appear in a table below (which we call the “Result Table”). On the top right is the
“Chart Preview,” where you can choose your visualization.
Tweaking your visualizations is as simple as working with the Result Table in the same way you would a
spreadsheet, then manipulating the automatically generated charts in the Chart Preview. Once you’re done
creating your chart, all that’s left is to click the big blue “Save to Dashboard” button.This process is unique to
each BI platform.

8. Share Your Report/Dashboard

The context in which you share your BI reporting is just as important as the report or dashboard itself. In short,
you need to share your visualizations in a context in which they can be acted upon. A few options to consider
include:
 Keeping the report/dashboard in the BI platform itself, granting access or providing links to others who
have logins.
 Sharing the report/dashboard on a TV or monitor.
 Creating an automated email report and Slack alerts tied to certain dashboard conditions.
 Embedding the dashboard online, in your own product, or within other tools.

How business intelligence works

Businesses and organizations have questions and goals. To answer these questions and track performance
against these goals, they gather the necessary data, analyze it, and determine which actions to take to reach
their goals.
On the technical side, raw data is collected from business systems. Data is processed and then stored in data
warehouses, the cloud, applications, and files. Once it’s stored, users can access the data, starting the
analysis process to answer business questions.
BI platforms also offer data visualization tools, which convert data into charts or graphs, as well as presenting
to any key stakeholders or decision-makers.
BI methods business intelligence is an umbrella term that covers the processes and methods of collecting,
storing, and analyzing data from business operations or activities to optimize performance. All of these things
come together to create a comprehensive view of a business to help people make better, actionable decisions.
Over the past few years, business intelligence has evolved to include more processes and activities to help
improve performance. These processes include:
 Data mining: Using databases, statistics, and machine learning (ML) to uncover trends in large
datasets
 Reporting: Sharing data analysis to stakeholders so they can draw conclusions and make decisions
 Performance metrics and benchmarking: Comparing current performance data to historical data to
track performance against goals, typically using customized dashboards
 Descriptive analytics: Using preliminary data analysis to find out what happened
 Querying: Asking the data-specific questions, BI pulling the answers from the data sets
 Statistical analysis: Taking the results from descriptive analytics and further exploring the data using
statistics such as how this trend happened and why
 Data visualization: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts, graphs, and
histograms to more easily consume data
 Visual analysis: Exploring data through visual storytelling to communicate insights on the fly and stay
in the flow of analysis
 Data preparation: Compiling multiple data sources, identifying the dimensions and measurements,
and preparing it for data analysis