If you’re familiar with the expression, or perhaps have seen the eponymous film, you understand the idea of something with far less importance or weight driving a much bigger process. In the film’s case, the expression was used to characterize a completely fabricated war shifting attention away from an actual scandal. For our purposes here, consider it this way: a business purchasing their end-use BI tool before crafting the strategy behind what they want and how they want to use it.

It’s a tempting situation. Vendors do a very good job of promoting their business intelligence tools, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But a company can’t rely on that alone to solve the big questions. You wouldn’t buy a dishwasher and then build a house around it…so why rush to invest in a BI tool before you’ve determined exactly what you want out of it and what questions the business wants to answer?

This over-reliance on proprietary tools has, at least for me, encouraged a focus on open-source BI tools. My most common tools of choice are MySQL for relational databases, RStudio for ETL and analytics, Shiny for R-based deployable visualizations, Orange for GUI-based analytics, and Git for source control. There are other tools, to be sure, and the beauty of the open-source sphere is the constant evolution. Beyond that, you are guaranteed not to invest in a proprietary solution that will be obsolete in a few years.

But more importantly–and where this fits into my point of wagging the dog–an open-source solution allows your company to pilot potential tools and solutions without the same level of risk and investment a proprietary solution may yield. I have seen companies invest plenty of money in proprietary solutions before they thought through the business process and wound up spending a tremendous amount time and money trying to make that solution work for what they needed even after they realized the tool was not right for them. They let the tail wag the dog.

Software is a tool, not a solution. Be sure you know what a tool needs to do for you before you choose it.

For further reading:

Statsbot – Open Source Business Intelligence

Big Data Made Simple – Top 10 free and open source business intelligence software

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