Analytics Solutions: Should You Buy one or Build one in house?

Analytics Solutions: Should You Buy One or Build one in house?

When it comes to business intelligence solutions, you can either buy one or build in house. Some enterprises choose to “Buy” a Business Intelligence solution as they want to deploy it and start using as soon as possible. Some enterprises also opt to “Build” their business intelligence solutions in-house because they feel that their use case is very unique and no solution that is available in the market, comes close to fulfilling their requirements.

Some of the questions that your enterprise may have before buying or building a business intelligence solution are:

  • Define the intent: What is the purpose of this solution, and how will it be managed, and updated over time?
  • Define Personas: Who are the core users of the solution who will interact with the solution, and for what purpose will they use the solution?
  • Define Opportunity cost: Time, Cost/Funds and Talent requirements needs to be analysed for both buy and build options

We will now deep dive into both options of Business Intelligence solutions and further understand the differences between them.

Building Your Business Intelligence Solution

Building a solution from scratch might look like an ideal option from the surface as it allows the Business Intelligence solution to be completely developed the way you want.

Building Business Intelligence in-house needs a high level of technical and business expertise, out of which you will have SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) but, you may need to work on the technical expertise. The focus will shift from your core business activity and your enterprise will spend more time developing a Business Intelligence solution.

Initially, you may be merely developing a proof of concept of a Business Intelligence solution rather than a complete platform for final use.

Here are some Pros and cons of building Business Intelligence and Data Analytics platform in-house:

Pros:

  • You can build what you need; Total control over KPIs and how to calculate them to generate insights.
  • You being SME’s; you know intricacies of your business that needs to be tracked and monitored.
  • Have it present at Point of use – Integrate it easily with any other tool that your enterprise uses.

Cons:

  • A high amount of cost is associated with setting up the infrastructure and development team for building analytics solution.
  • Having business knowledge and converting that into software requirements is Time consuming and iterative process.
  • Additional features or functionalities and other integrations must be custom-made, which can increase cost and take more time from the core activity of your business.
  • Maintaining team for constantly changing and evolving Analytics requirements is very draining on funds.

The volume of data and its complexity that your solution may require to account for, is most likely to increase. Technical and business requirements may also change over time. Therefore, it is important to keep all these things in mind as they may impact your budget and the time taken to develop and update the custom-made solution.

Buying A Business Intelligence Service

Save time and engineering costs by buying a subscription of more advanced, holistic and ever evolving Business Intelligence solution could be the best option for your enterprise.

The most important and motivating factor behind purchasing an existing business intelligence solution is that these business intelligence solutions are developed for specific Industries considering the holistic view of different business processes and all personas into consideration.

For example,

Intellify has a Lending Analytics solution designed for lending institutions that want to track KPIs related to Loan Origination, Loans Servicing and Collections.

Intellify also has a Financial Analytics business intelligence solution that can help enterprises from any industry to monitor their revenues, incomes, profits, assets, liabilities and cash flow easily. 

Here are some Pros and Cons of buying a BI solution:

Pros:

  • Quick to market: You can start using the business intelligence solution immediately with minimal time & money spent on it.
  • Ideal blend of SMEs and Technology: KPI bank is built by experienced SMEs and the nalytics solution is created by the well experienced BI and Technology experts.
  • Bringing it at point of use: To increase the adoption of BI and data driven decision making, BI solutions need to present at point of use.
  • Ever Evolving: The business intelligence solution provided by the vendor is continuously upgraded keeping the latest trends and industry developments in the in mind.

Cons:

  • Needs robust research: Buying an analytics solution requires robust research on the solutions available in the market and an active involvement of management and decision makers. If evaluator fails to choose best between the options, the analytics vision may fail.
  • The available solution might not be complete for your business but with 20% customization, it can fit your all needs of your organization
  • Gap Analysis: You need to do a gap analysis between the available solutions and your expectations. If not done properly, you will not get the desired outcome.
  • Standardization: Ready-to-use solutions are usually built as per industry standards. If you are niche within the industry, you may struggle to find an exact match to your needs. But ready solution will give you head start and complete it by customization.

Now that you have a good understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of buying and building a business intelligence solution, you should also consider the resources it will take to build one in-house.

Resources Required for Creating Your Own BI Solution

Below listed are some basic resources that are required to build your own BI solution:

Data Warehouse:

As the name suggests, a data warehouse is a place where all the data will get stored. This is the place that is optimized for all types of analytical queries that your enterprise may need to perform.

Extract, Transform and Load (ETL):

ETL is responsible for extracting your primary database, transforming it into a pre-defined format and load into your data warehouse to perform the analyses.  

If you are planning to analyse stored data on SaaS/Cloud Services, your enterprise will still need to write and run the scripts to extract, transform and load the required data in the data warehouse.

Business Intelligence & Data Visualization:

Power BI, Tableau, and Google Data Studio are some examples of data analytics and business intelligence solutions that can be implemented to analyse and interpret data easily.

Comparison of Buy vs Build Intellify’s Lending Analytics Solution

      Costs Comparison of Buy vs Build for Intellify’s Lending Analytics Solution

      In the above table, we have taken an example of Intellify’s Lending Analytics solution that provides 18+ interactive dashboards and 100+ KPIs on day 0.

      From a cost and additional technological resources point of view, building from scratch would take plenty of time, effort, and funds.

      Make Your Choice wisely & Get Started

      Irrespective of what decision you take, it is better to decide than stay idle. A lot of things need to be kept in mind while managing large volumes of data.

      Intellify has years of experience and expertise in building state-of-the-art data visualization and business intelligence solution that helps your enterprise to make better decisions promptly. If you wish to connect with our experts for a demo, click here.