For Media and Marketing Professional Eyes Only: How to Evaluate Any BI Platform

For Media and Marketing Professional Eyes Only: How to Evaluate Any BI Platform

By William A. Lederer, Chairman and CEO, iSOCRATES®

There are myriad benefits of MADTechAI tools for media and marketing professionals. For example, you’ll be able to properly track your KPIs, make better business predictions, and capture and unify diverse data sets. However, you need to find the right platform for your specific needs. Here are some tips for evaluating vendors.

1. Ask Yourself the Right Questions

What’s your likely budget now and going forward? All-in? Do you have the financial, technical, and human resources available and permissioned to get all the migrations, customization, and training required, and to manage the platform on your own, or do you need managed services? Who will provide these under what circumstances and at what cost?

Will you lose naming conventions, data visualizations, and custom modeling if you switch to a new BI tool or entire platform? Have you determined how you will get your first corporate “wins” from the new BI solution and how you will achieve an overall ROI that justifies the decision?

2. Determine Your Needs

What are your analytical needs? What are your visualization needs? Will you need your instance to be “skinnable” with your own logo and color palette? How easily will this be to implement? Will you need parent-child accounts (e.g., separate, limited access vs. enterprise-level access)? How much data do you need to be able to handle? How much of the activity will need to be real-time or close to it? What specific data sources do you need to integrate currently and in the foreseeable future?

Are they buy-side or sell-side? Do you need heavy customization? What types of alerts do you require to run your business effectively (e.g., dynamic rules-based vs. simple status updates)? What will your Service Level Agreement needs be (e.g., support-ticket response time, service outage exposure)?

3. Create an Effective RFP

The Request for Proposal (“RFP”) contains a list of specific questions and user needs that you can send to vendors and use to compare solution providers. Make sure the RFP includes inquiries about data storage options, the implementation process, data integrations, the user experience, and whether the vendor can handle your needs as your business evolves.

4. Evaluate the Contract

Before signing with a vendor, it’s essential to review and edit the contract to ensure that it’s favorable to your needs. Understand how the pricing, customer support, and managed services work. Avoid contracts that last more than a few years. And, be clear about documenting which must-have features you expect to get from your vendor.

Don’t be afraid to put in an Exhibit to the final contract to highlight those features/capabilities deemed essential and what you expect them to do for you. This will protect you from the vendor deprecating those things in the future during the life of your contract and not being able to hold them accountable. Give yourself a contractual “out” if they do not replace the feature/functionality.

If you’re interested in learning more about procuring MADTechAI and how to choose the right platform for your needs, download our latest whitepaper.