When Is It Time to Migrate BI Platforms? Watch for These 7 Key Indicators

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You’ve been working in the same business intelligence platform for years and you know things are off—but it’s hard to say goodbye. We’ve been there. It’s the familiar pain of staying the same vs. the pain of change. Thankfully, we’ve got a checklist that will help you know if the data platform you’re using today isn’t getting you to the place you need to be. (You can even use it to convince your boss it’s time to migrate.) After you decide you want to migrate, check out our migration guide on making it all happen here. 

1. Your business (including leadership) is frustrated.

“Democratized self-service analytics” is a term that has been thrown around for years, yet the business teams you serve continue to be frustrated by the lack of data and insights they can get. Intakes continue to balloon, and most of your time is spent fulfilling basic requests that need to be done yesterday, without focusing on larger, more transformative initiatives for your organization. Your stakeholders are your customers—interview them, offer surveys for feedback, and leverage the results as the business case for migrating to your new platform.

2. Your “self-service platform” takes too long to load.

“Well, we need to aggregate this data first, through nightly batch processes so it can render properly in reporting.” Sound familiar? Traditional BI just wasn’t designed with the size of data we now have. That means you’re possibly spending your precious minutes staring at a dashboard and waiting for it to render—instead of analyzing your data and doing something with it.  Worse yet, you’re spending hours in Slack or Teams getting questions like “Why isn’t this loading?” or “Why is this report so slow?” Spreadsheets literally can’t handle today’s datasets, and neither can many other BI tools. You need a scalable solution that grows with your cloud storage. It’s time to move on when your tool literally can’t keep up with the details of your business. 

3. Adoption isn’t what you hoped.

You were given a directive from your executive team to enable the entire company to make data-driven decisions, and maybe you signed up 25 people to use the platform, but now have just five active users. Take a look at their activity data: In the last month, is the number of queries from those users increasing or decreasing? You might have outgrown your existing platform when you see that number continuing to drop, despite efforts to grow it.

4. Your backlog of data requests just won’t stop growing. 

As much as you want to ignore it, your data team is still working on requests from months ago. You can continue to be optimistic they’ll catch up, but in reality you just need a platform that can eliminate the problem all together. That means you need to empower those closest to the data to do their own analysis and take their own actions. 

5. Your work is just seen as a consumption layer—or worse, an export layer.

“Can you make this more tabular so I can just export this to Excel?” You’ve heard it all before. Spending hours making pixel-perfect dashboards only for your teams to export to Sheets or Excel, then do their own formatting before presenting to executives. Why can’t your platform be beautiful and performant?

6. Data is constantly leaving your platform for additional context.

The role of a “dashboard” in most organizations today is simply to understand the current state of operations, and go no further than that. Most companies run their business with their BI platform supporting decisions. At Sigma, we believe companies should run their business on their BI platform. That means going from data, to making decisions, to acting on them in a secure and governed fashion, which fundamentally changes the speed at which your organization can move.

Because of our beliefs and core ethos, we felt it was necessary to unlock this workflow through a magical little tool we have called Input Tables. Forecast next year’s headcount, scenario-plan your territories, create auditable workflows for month-end close—do it all in one place, and leverage your cloud data warehouse as the landing zone for all of it.

7. Stale data is costing you actual dollars.

Markets change every second of the day. So why would you continue working with data that isn’t live? Market-moving decisions are costing you. It’s simply not realistic in today’s economic conditions to work with data that’s days, or even worse, weeks old. If you’re still working this way, you need to move to a platform that’s fully flexible, live, and lets you collaborate with your entire team to make decisions in the moment.

Conclusion

Evolving your platform, and more importantly, your organization, doesn’t have to be difficult. Follow our migration guide and see how Sigma can solve problems with stale data, bottlenecked data teams, and more. 

Start a free trial or try out one of our favorite templates here.