Deloitte Consulting popularized the phrase insights-driven organization (IDO). Essentially, this refers to companies that have meaningfully embedded data, analytics, and BI capabilities into the company’s decision-making process. What this means in practice is that modern BI platforms must make analytics accessible to decision-makers across the entire organization, including middle management leaders and functional heads, not just the executive suite including middle management leaders and functional heads. It must not become a tool for executive leaders, while department heads may not have access to sophisticated analytics or insights.
The leading market research firm Forrester published a report titled ‘The Future of Business Intelligence’. It highlights the need for companies to modernize their BI and analytics capabilities, to truly become an IDO. Specifically, it focuses on how analytics must go beyond just churning out data signals from data, charts, dashboards, etc. It must help a user cull out insights as efficiently and effectively as possible, and use that information to plan the next steps.
The key, according to Forrester, is to pursue a BI roadmap that delivers “actionable, personalized, adaptive, and pervasive” business intelligence. And, legacy BI with its dashboards-oriented approach to capturing data signals is certainly not enough.
Why Are Legacy BI Tools Failing Modern Organizations?
The biggest problem with legacy BI tools and legacy analytics platforms is a fundamental disconnect between insights, decisions, and actions.Let’s explain this with an example.
One of our customers was using Oracle EBS for its ERP workflow. It was looking for a reporting and analytics tool that could provide deeper insights across functions as well as a partner who could provide end-to-end management of its reporting infrastructure. But, it was not only about insights but also about making sure insights got converted into on-ground operational actions.
With the legacy BI tool the company was using, it was difficult for department heads to make decisions on product mix, inventory management, forecast demand, and use predictive analytics to improve marketing campaigns.
The biggest challenge: while there was data available for business users, it lacked context. The need of the hour is context-aware BI tools, and legacy tools are not able to deliver this.
The company needed a better solution. It needed a BI solution that truly empowered business users across manufacturing, retailing, finance, and marketing. Sure, users across these teams wanted better data visualization, charts, and dashboards.
But what they really wanted was personalized and actionable insights, which could help them go from “data-to-insight-to-action” as quickly as possible.
What Does a Modern BI Platform Actually Deliver?
The business team at the customer was able to use the self-service and visualization capabilities of the Orbit BI tool to create dashboards and do a deep analysis of their end-to-end operations like:
- Inventory management
- Distribution data, using various filters
- Sales/Revenue by store, by location, by geography
- Sales data by type/model
- Demand forecasting and predictive analytics by region and by model
Also, for this customer, it made sense to outsource the entire process of managing reporting and analytics to a single partner like Orbit. This enabled them to focus on their core business, while simultaneously garnering insights from analytics without having to worry about the nitty-gritty of it. They took advantage of Orbit’s Managed Services business model to make this happen.
In fact, we’ve written down the mission of Orbit in as much detail:
“Our singular vision is to help organizations be resilient by providing technology to make data-driven decisions, and our consuming passion is in designing and building zero-coding self-service applications.”
We believe the following are the key traits of a truly modern BI platform:
- Personalized insights are delivered to the right people, so it becomes actionable
- Insights are delivered by truly unifying data from several sources. There is no use in deriving intelligence from siloed data.
- The platform has to be self-service. If you rely on a data engineer or third-party vendor to garner insights, then your company is still struggling with data democracy.
- Last but not least, as the Forrester report puts it, it is critical to make BI pervasive. This means that insights must be available to all decision makers in the company, not only beyond a particular level.
Orbit’s Business Intelligence solution brings to the fore the following key features and capabilities:
- Real-time monitoring of KPIs with the ability to visualize with micro-charts
- Orbit’s Insights feature is packed with sophisticated capabilities such as density reduction and advanced visualizations. All Insights can be saved as re-useable widgets or shared with the team to increase collaboration on data analysis.
- Orbit Scheduler plays a key role in process automation, this includes planning, organizing, scheduling, and monitoring daily jobs and reports.
- Multiple Delivery Channels can be configured to automate report outputs to be delivered via email, FTP, or REST API to folders including cloud storage applications
- The document bursting feature allows users to run a single report while only the relevant information is delivered to users based on business rules
- Robust data governance: Orbit User Management for authentication and authorization comes with built-in integrations for leading ERP applications including Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), Oracle ERP Cloud (Fusion), Peoplesoft, NetSuite, and Salesforce.
For more information, visit: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/orbit-business-intelligence/
Frequently Asked Questions
What is legacy BI?
Legacy BI refers to traditional business intelligence platforms that rely on static dashboards, IT-driven report development, and siloed data connections. These tools typically require technical expertise to generate insights, creating bottlenecks that slow decision-making and limit analytics access to a small number of trained users.
What is modern BI and how is it different from legacy BI?
Modern BI platforms are self-service, cloud-native analytics tools that unify data across systems and deliver contextual, actionable insights to business users directly. Unlike legacy BI, which requires IT involvement for report creation, modern BI empowers non-technical users to explore data independently and get answers in minutes.
What are the signs that your organization is stuck on legacy analytics?
Common signs include report backlogs exceeding two weeks, business users maintaining shadow spreadsheets because official reports lack detail, analytics access limited to a small team, inability to combine data from multiple systems without manual effort, and decision-makers relying on month-old data for operational choices.
What are examples of legacy BI tools?
Common legacy BI tools include older versions of Business Objects, Cognos, Crystal Reports, Hyperion Interactive Reporting, and Discoverer. These platforms were designed for an era of on-premises data and centralized IT reporting. While some have received updates, their core architectures often lack the self-service and cloud-native capabilities that define modern BI.
How long does it take to migrate from legacy BI to modern BI?
A phased migration from legacy analytics to modern BI typically takes three to six months for initial high-priority use cases, with full organizational rollout spanning six to twelve months. The timeline depends on the number of active legacy reports, data source complexity, and the level of user enablement investment.
