Business Intelligence Solution RFP

Request for Proposal

Corporate Overview

Product and Platform Capabilities

Data Connectivity & Integration

Data Preparation

Visualizations & Dashboards

Content Creation

Discovery and Exploration

Scheduling and Distribution

Collaboration & Sharing

Mobile & Alerts

Deployment & Adoption

Client Services

Availability

Technical Architecture and Data Security

General

Authentication

Security

Pricing

References

Corporate Overview

  1. Provide a brief company overview including corporate headquarters, number of employees, and whether you are publicly held or privately owned.
  2. Describe the experience of your leadership team.
  3. Briefly describe your solution.
  4. Does your platform offer solutions by role (sales, marketing, finance, etc.) and industry (retail, media, financial services, etc.)?
  5. What are your top three differentiators/unique strengths?
  6. How have you helped shape the BI industry today through innovation and product development?
  7. What industries and clients do you serve? Provide examples similar to our size and scope. What are the functional roles and position titles which most commonly use your product?
  8. What awards and accolades has your company received?

Product and Platform Capabilities

Data Connectivity & Integration

  1. Describe how the solution integrates with other systems.
  2. Describe connectivity capabilities to other data sources. What sources do you natively connect to? Do you rely on third parties to create connections?
  3. What are the different options you offer for connecting to data sources (e.g., native API, scheduled file transfer, manual upload)?
  4. How frequently do you pull data from the data sources?
  5. How do you bring on-premises data in house? Can this be automated?
  6. Please describe the process of acquiring cloud-based, enterprise on-premises, and personal data sources, and to combine those for analysis and reporting. Are there third-party software or hardware requirements to do this?
  7. Is it possible for a business user or decision maker with limited technical expertise to connect data sources?If so, describe how.
  8. Describe how the business user can view statistics on the overall quality and distribution of the data. Is this data available to all users of the platform? How does the product help users identify potential issues with the data?
  9. Do you offer an API so that customers can extract data from your platform?

Data Preparation

  1. Describe the included ETL/data integration capabilities of the platform. What technical skill sets are required?
  2. Describe how the product supports business user data mashup and modeling. (e.g. combined multiple data sources and apply logic/transformations to create a dataset ready for analysis).
  3. Describe how the user enhances the data such as renaming, combining or splitting columns, automatic date transforms, etc.
  4. Describe how data is stored and managed for exploration by the platform.

Visualizations & Dashboards

Content Creation

  1. Describe dashboard design capabilities and ease of use. Can end-users build their own content without reliance upon IT or technical resources?
  2. Describe pre-built analytic content available to end-users for immediate consumption. How do users access the content and do they need administrative oversight?
  3. Describe the chart types your solution provides.
  4. Describe the ability to arrange multiple visualizations on a page.
  5. Describe the number and range of sample KPIs offered in your library. How does your solution incorporate industry and role-based best practice KPIs?
  6. Do you support the ability to create a customized visualization that can combine multiple KPIs and metrics to tell a story graphically, similar to infographics? Describe your ecosystem surrounding this and provide examples of infographics created for other clients.
  7. Does your solution offer open APIs for integration with third-party visualizations or analytical functions?
  8. Can we re-use and share content across different roles and departments within our company?
  9. Can we incorporate other documents into the business management platform (e.g. PPT or PDF docs, etc.)?

Discovery and Exploration

  1. Describe the ability to manipulate and filter data.
  2. Describe your ability to drill down on any dimension, attribute, or metric in the underlying data set.
  3. Does the system allow end-users to create their own, custom calculations?
  4. Does your solution offer pre-built relative-time capabilities for period to date, last X days, etc. analysis?
  5. Does your solution offer system-wide content search capabilities?

Scheduling and Distribution

  1. Does the product provide reports to end users (both internal and external) on an on-demand or scheduled basis? Is it able to schedule reports to be distributed based on date/time and events that have occurred?
  2. Does the system provide presentation (Excel, PPT, Word) as well as print capabilities?
  3. Does the system send automated email/SMS text messages of scheduled output?

Collaboration Sharing

  1. Do you offer the ability to collaborate with other users or teams natively within the platform? If so, does your platform offer both private and public collaboration channels as well as direct messaging? Provide screenshots.
  1. Is your collaboration platform optimized for mobile?
  1. Describe the platform’s project planning and task assignment capabilities. Can tasks be assigned directly from withinthe collaboration tool?
  2. Is it possible to receive alerts from third party applications within your collaboration tool?
  3. Describe how you enable discussion threads and commentary on shared content (reports, dashboards, analysis). Can users see a snapshot of the data at the time of the comment in the discussion thread?Is chronology and all history maintained? Can file attachments be shared?
  4. Describe your solution’s ability to publish data dynamically to a website or URL? Are there additional fees associated with this? Can this be encrypted?
  5. Can owners be assigned to system content, including data sources, reports, etc.?
  6. Discuss the ability for users to follow other users based on their interest areas.

Mobile & Alerts

  1. Can end-users create their own, customizable business rules and alerts?
  2. Describe the delivery methods are available for alerting (email, RSS feed, mobile, other).
  3. Describe the solution’s mobile experience(phone andtablet). Specify which native mobile apps are available. How frequently is content updated for mobile consumption?
  4. How can we easily view what content is trending or most popular in our organization?
  5. How can a user explore our organization and view contact information and profiles of their colleagues?
  6. Describe the ability for users to personalize their favorites and follow certain content and users of interest.
  7. Are visualizations consistent across all platforms (e.g. desktop, web, mobile)?

Deployment & Adoption

  1. Describe the expertise of your consulting deployment team.
  2. How will you consult with us to deploy our solution? What resources are required from our organization?Do you offer self-service options?
  3. What specifically do our IT or BI teams need to do to support the solution?
  4. Please provide an example of a typical deployment timeline.
  5. What are common deployment challenges, and how do you help your clients overcome them?
  6. Do you utilize the platform within your own organization? Describe the complete solution in-use including metrics on utilization.
  7. How do you ensure transmission of best practices in deployment that will result in a rapid path to value from our investment in the solution?

Client Services

  1. What support and client care do you offer?
  2. How do you measure client satisfaction?
  3. What are your standard service levels and response times, including system uptime?
  4. Describe how we may engage your support team for any incidents and issue escalations.
  5. Describe the types of online training resources (user guides, tutorials, modules) provided by your organization, as well as any live support offered.
  6. Does your tool have embedded capabilities to interact directly with a customer community? Directly with Product Management? Customer Support?
  7. Do you offer an online community for sharing best practices among all of your clients’ users?
  8. What is your approach to product development and how do you prioritize enhancements?

Availability

  1. Describe your scheduled maintenance frequency. How will you notify us of changes and how much lead-time is provided?
  2. What software or hardware is needed? How do you handle the release of enhancements, upgrades and ongoing maintenance?
  3. Describe your formalized and documented Disaster Recovery Plan for business continuity.
  4. What is your backup policy and procedure?

Technical Architecture and Data Security

General

  1. Please provide a simplified description of your solution so our technical team can understand the general context.
  2. Please quantify the volume of transactions your solution currently supports.
  3. Please describe your system’s ability to dynamically scale based on user and query demands.

Authentication

  1. Please outline the various user levels and their associated permissions and capabilities. Does the platform support column, row, and cell (object) level security?
  2. Describe how the Business Management Platform is able to import and seamlessly leverage security defined in another application (s) such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc.
  3. Do your tools leverage a common security definition or common security principles?
  4. Describe the platform's audit trail capabilities with regard to user transactions, failed logon attempts, and protection of the logs against modification and unauthorized use, etc.

Security

  1. Describe the experience and certifications of your information security team. Who in your organization is responsible for the overall security of the site?
  2. How is our data segregated from other clients?
  3. Is any data shared with third parties? If so, please describe.
  4. Does the solution support Federated Single Sign on (SSO)? Which methods are available (i.e. SAML 2.0)?
  5. Describe the encryption standards that are used by the systems both, “at rest” and in transit.
  6. Describe the solution provider’s assessment process and which cloud inspectors are used or certifications you have (e.g., Safe Harbor, PCI, SSAE 16 audits/SOC II, etc.).
  7. Does the solution have external penetration tests at least quarterly and internal network security audits at least annually? Discuss how the results of those tests are handled.
  8. Describe your firewall infrastructure / implementation tiers.
  9. Describe your hosting arrangement (i.e., in-house, co-hosted, cloud-based, etc.). Please provide the name and location of any partners.
  10. Describe your back-up processes.
  11. How many security breaches have occurred on your network in the past 5 years?

Pricing

  1. Provide the approximate cost to establish a solution for our organization’s size, scale, and revenue base. Include first-year implementation costs and then any ongoing or maintenance fees. For example:
  • Implementation Fees
  • Platform Fees
  • User/License Fees
  • Training and education costs
  • Ongoing consulting support or maintenance costs
  • Other costs, please specify
  1. Are there storage limitations or additional costs based on storage volume increases? How do you scale with us as our data grows?

References

  1. Provide two current client references.