Best business intelligence platform of 2024

Best business intelligence platform of 2024

The best business intelligence platforms make it simple and easy to mine data for insights to communicate to stakeholders.

Now that organizations can now collect data on every aspect of their business, from sales and marketing, to workflows and productivity, to hiring and HR, to overall performance and profitability, the ability to sort through all this data for real and actionable insights has never been so important.

However, many of these data points exist in isolation and require dedicated business intelligence (BI) tools to tie in key information from each angle into an overall whole.

Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile – g Release

This can then allow for real insights and predictions for improving business performance, not least through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A number of software packages also come with their own analytics, but these can also often be exported into a business intelligence platform.

Even more importantly, the best BI software will be driven by visualizations you can share with stakeholders, to help communicate sometimes complex statistics as easy to understand charts and diagrams.

Here then are the best business intelligence tools for business currently available.

We’ve also highlighted the best productivity gadgets for business.

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile

Best free business intelligence platform

(Image credit: Microsoft)

1. Microsoft Power BI

The software giant provides a free business intelligence tool

Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Best business intelligence platform of 2024

 

Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition

Reasons to avoid-

Requires software download

Software behemoth, Microsoft, also plays in the business intelligence tool space, and their offering is Microsoft Power BI. They even have a Microsoft Business Applications Summit that features their Power BI, and not surprisingly other Microsoft business applications. Unlike some of their competition that take a totally web-based portal approach, Power BI also offers downloadable software, so you can run your analytics either in the cloud or via a reporting server.

There is a generous sixty day trial of the software, which promises to “Connect hundreds of data sources,” including Microsoft applications, and other sources such as Facebook, Sybase and Oracle which can then prep data for subsequent data analysis on the fly, allowing reports to be created in just a matter of minutes.

Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Best business intelligence platform of 2024
Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition

Pricing begins at the Power BI Desktop tier for a single user, which is fully functional, and free. The next tier up is Power BI Pro and supports collaboration between users, and real time data analysis, and includes a 60 day trial.

Take a look at our Microsoft discount codes for the best Microsoft offers and savings.

Best business intelligence platform for analytics

(Image credit: Tableau)

2. Tableau Desktop

Strong visuals and real-time analytics

Reasons to buy+

Free trial offer

+

Slick interface with drag and drop buttons

Tableau Desktop endeavors to do more than make charts, but rather to show “live visual analytics.” A slick interface with drag and drop buttons allows the user to quickly be able to spot trends in the data. There is a lengthy list of supported data sources, including Microsoft Excel, Google Analytics, Box and PDF files.

Tableau enjoys the ability to connect with pretty much any type of database, as well as use a whole range of data blending options, to output into an even bigger selection of charts. Dashboard visualizations can be easily shared, and are mobile friendly.

Tableau Desktop becomes an expensive option for a single user, making this more expensive than other competing solutions. On balance, it also includes the associated application of Tableau Prep under the Tableau Creator package.

Best simple business intelligence platform

(Image credit: Dundas)

3. Dundas BI

An experienced and simple to use BI tool

Reasons to buy+

Browser based

+

Drag and drop interface

+

Free 45 day trial

Dundas is a browser based business intelligence tool with 25 years of experience. It is designed to be a single tool to transform data into visual data analytics with “granular control over almost all visual design elements.”

Data files can be incorporated with drag and drop functionality allowing end users to analyze data without involvement from IT. The HTML5 interface allows it to be used across a variety, including mobile, devices.

There is a free 45 day trial, but after the pricing is opaque and requires a quote, but there are options to lease annually, or own for perpetuity.

Best web-based business intelligence platform

(Image credit: Zoho)

4. Zoho Analytics

A tool from folks that have a cloud-based approach in their DNA

Reasons to buy+

Support to collect data from many sources

+

Visually attractive dashboard

+

Availability of free trial

Reasons to avoid-

Requires purchase on annual basis

Zoho Analytics is the business intelligence tool from the folks that have plenty of experience with web-based business tools, namely the venerable Zoho Office. Zoho Reports is a robust solution, that can integrate data from a variety of files, including Microsoft Office documents, URL feeds, and databases, such as MySQL, along with applications, of course from Zoho, but also outside their ecosystem including data from the cloud from Box, DropBox, Google Drive and other applications (for example Salesforce, Quickbooks and Google Analytics).

Data can then be blended via integrated mathematical and statistical formulas, for example marketing costs in an Excel file, with sales data in a cloud database, to create a visually attractive and informative report. This is all done via a simple online interface, and functions can be applied via a simple drag and drop, with reports that can be easily viewed via the portal, or also printed or emailed.

Best business intelligence platform for enterprises

(Image credit: Sisense)

5. Sisense

The business intelligence tool of Fortune 500 companies

Reasons to buy+

Rapid deployment

+

Incorporates AI

+

White label analytics

SiSense is a business intelligence tool that seeks to simplify the complexities of data analysis by building in IoT, machine learning and AI into their platform. They claim it is so simple and streamlined, that you can go from “data to dashboard in just 90 minutes.” While we can argue the validity of that claim, their list of clients, including the likes of GE, Philips, Fujitsu, NBC and Airbus would back up that this is a top tier product.

Main features include the ability to embed white label analytics with customizations, mashup live or cached data, analyze data across your entire landscape or focus on specific areas such as object, data, or system.

Sisense is an enterprise BI program that can be run in the cloud, or on premises. However, there no flat-rate pricing is provided for either model. Their custom pricing is based on an annual subscription model, but it requires a price quote, and is unfortunately not available on their website.

We’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to BI, as there are many providers in the market. However, the caveat is always that a software platform is only as good as its programmers, and data always needs to be the best quality – too many managers presume that processes and workflows are being correctly followed when they may not be and therefore undermine analyzes. Additionally, while there are comprehensive BI tools available there are also ones that focus on particular areas, such as sales or distribution, in order to provide more detailed and focused insights:

Looker is another full-spectrum analytics and business intelligence platform that provides real-time reporting. To get the most out of it some MySQL knowledge would be helpful, but training materials are provided as required. Even without, Looker is an easy to use platform for data discovery that can accommodate a number of third-party sources.

Qualtrics Research Core is more focused on working through developing, collating, and analyzing survey data, and uses its own AI to tease out trends and actionable insights. This can be especially useful when applied to sales and marketing campaigns for analyzing not just results but can also be used to identify ideal price points.

Adobe Analytics is a tool especially dedicated to tracking the customer journey online, and provides data to analyze how to more effectively engage with them according to their sources, ie, social media. It’s able to work with complex databases to generate quick results, which can then be exported or printed easily.

We’ve also featured the best business laptops.

Best business intelligence platform FAQsWhich business intelligence platform is best for you?

When deciding which business intelligence platform to download and use, first consider what your actual needs are, as sometimes cheaper software may only provide basic options, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a more expensive platform is much more worthwhile. Additionally, higher-end software can really cater for every need, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require from your business intelligence platform.

How we tested the best business intelligence platform

To test for the best business intelligence platform we first set up an account with the relevant software provider, then tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations, analyzing data from different sources and looking at different ways to present the results. The aim was to push each business intelligence platform platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.

Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.

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The deluge of work apps

So you decide to take a vacation from work. You ask your boss, get the go-ahead, and then realize you have no idea how to submit your vacation request. You can barely remember the name of the HR system your company uses, and when you search your inbox to jog your memory, the software you’re confronted with makes you feel like you’ve never used a computer before. It’s fine, though, because your boss doesn’t even understand how to approve the request. A coworker mentions that, after fumbling around the site for what felt like forever, they couldn’t even figure out how to find their salary in it. It almost feels like the person who built the app hasn’t used a computer.

Maybe the above scenario is a slight exaggeration, but to work in America in the year 2024 is to drown in a sea of apps. If you want to take time off, there’s an app for that. And it’s different from the one where you sign up for benefits or submit expenses or handle reviews or do the mental-health exercises that it’s honestly kind of weird your company is pushing on you. Everything is managed by a litany of largely indistinguishable software programs with nearly unpronounceable names that are impossible to navigate. For many workers, managers, and even HR professionals, they’re deeply frustrating and an enormous time suck. The pandemic and the rise of remote work have only made the situation worse. According to a survey of 2,000 organizations by Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm, companies now use an average of 21 HR “modules” — meaning various apps to conquer different tasks — up from 10.4 in 2019.

“You end up with what I call the ‘kitchen drawer’ of HR software,” said Josh Bersin, a global HR analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Co., a consultancy. “You open the kitchen drawer, and you look in there, and you go, ‘What’s all this stuff doing in here? Where did we get it all?’”

How did we get here? For one thing, the HR-software market is a lucrative one; IBISWorld estimates it’s worth $20 billion in the US. It has some big names — Workday, Oracle, ADP — but also a plethora of smaller businesses and platforms, all promising to make managing a workforce better. For companies, managing workers via software instead of human beings is an appealing prospect. Technology and automation have decoupled the size of the company from the number of people required to manage everyone: Instead of having one HR person for every 100 employees, you can, in theory, have one HR person for however big a company gets because of digital systems to handle the scale. The technology is ideally meant to make it so one HR professional can manage administration, compliance, and requests for many more workers than in the on-paper, in-person past.

“HR teams have become more and more lean,” said Ashley Herd, the founder of Manager Method, a training platform for managers. “Frequently I talk to companies and they’ll have 200, 500 employees, and there’s really one or two dedicated HR people, so it’s like an octopus.” Herd added, “Even with all the technology in the world, an HR person’s inbox is crazy.”

If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

With fewer dedicated HR workers, many employees are left to fend for themselves. The problem is that each company has its own systems, and businesses aren’t investing in training employees on those systems. They’ve also decimated the ranks of middle managers who might be able to help. People’s tenures at work are shrinking, too, meaning that by the time they figure all the systems out, they’re on to the next job. This all means that it takes employees longer to get up-to-speed at new gigs and start firing on all cylinders, productivity-wise, because they’re wasting all this time figuring out how to do their jobs instead of just doing them.

“The front office now, in addition to doing its day job, has a proliferation of disparate solutions and disparate combinations of solutions at each company to familiarize with and learn how to use,” said Zachary Chertok, a research manager for employee experience at IDC, a market-intelligence firm.

Whatever the software, the experience for employees is often not great. It feels like a lot of this stuff is designed for the back office without the front office in mind or by people who just don’t really know what a good user experience would be. Management wants to know how many vacation days you took, and it doesn’t care if you had fun putting them into the app, so the app designers tend to deprioritize UX for the frontline employees. Even the big, sprawling tools like UKG and ADP can’t do everything — Harsh Kundulli, a senior director analyst in the HR practice at Gartner, a consultancy, told me that even companies that have invested in big human-capital-management systems still wind up having to use other HR software to fill in the gaps.

The issue isn’t just the people making the programs — it’s the companies buying them. Businesses often put various programs and apps in place without enough forethought. They worry about employee burnout, and instead of addressing what’s going on with their workers, they toss them a mental-health app that no one will ever actually use. Different leaders come in with different ideas about which programs they do and don’t like, and software providers have an incentive to constantly sell businesses new and different features. If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

“There are too many technology solutions out there, all claiming to have all kinds of overlapping capabilities,” Kundulli said. “Many times, HR leaders do not have the insight into the market to be able to orchestrate or to combine the right types of technologies, so they often end up buying many technologies that have overlapping capabilities with redundancies.”

Leaders can get excited about niche systems, too, using the big software for, say, payroll and the smaller, specialized programs for employee training or the initial phases of recruiting. This swinging back and forth makes the whole thing even messier.

“There’s this kind of ongoing cycle in software of bundling and then unbundling,” said Tomer London, the cofounder of Gusto, a payroll and HR platform for small and midsize businesses. His company is in the business of trying to bundle features into something that is, as London put it to me, as “intuitive, easy to use, delightful” as Instagram, which does sound nice. And hey, maybe they’ll get it figured out.

If the HR-software problem were easily solvable, it would probably already be solved. The experts I spoke with about fixes ranged from modestly optimistic to deeply pessimistic about the future of people management by robot. Companies aren’t bringing sprawling HR departments back — they’re too inefficient and expensive. It’s not clear we want to go back to the kind of bad old days of the HR lady filling out your paperwork next to your desk anyway.

“When money’s tight and they want to cut costs to demonstrate that they’re being responsible to their shareholders, they will put in software,” Carrie Bulger, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Quinnipiac University.

Some platforms put a layer over the top of various tools that puts them all in one place so that employees have one portal and don’t realize how many different things they’re dealing with. It’s a sort of artificial Russian nesting doll situation. ServiceNow does that, and some companies have big-enough IT operations that they can create these products on their own, Bersin said — meaning their employees don’t have to touch the shit software they’re actually using.

AI’s not going to fix all of this.

As with so many industries, artificial intelligence is also rearing its head. The hope in HR tech is that AI will be a game changer — that it will lead to a data-analysis revolution and create a fleet of digital assistants that can take care of annoying HR tasks so you don’t have to. Some people I talked with envisioned AI-powered chatbots that can tell workers how to accomplish tasks — basically, you type in “Where do I see my pay stub?” or “How do I submit my expense report?” or maybe put in your vacation request and get it sent straight to your manager.

“Each tool will have its own version of a digital assistant,” Chertok said. “In the near term, you’re still going to have to know which system do I go to for what? But the how is not going to be as much of a challenge because the assistant’s going to be there to help you through it.”

That seems fine and good I suppose, but also, dealing with 10 little chatbots across 10 different tools is not wildly better than where we are. There’s a race to see if someone can create a digital assistant to rule them all — Oracle or ADP or Microsoft’s Copilot — but for now, there’s no clear winner.

Not everyone is so gung ho about AI’s potential. AI needs to have a somewhat clean data source where everything is linked and mapped out and connected, which is not a thing a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, have. Who among us has tried to check some HR policy and been confronted with two dozen versions, the most up-to-date one impossible to tell? The AI might not be able to figure that out either.

“AI’s not going to fix all of this until we sit down and go through the process of mapping and connecting the things we need to understand about our employees and what’s going to do to our business,” said Stacey Harris, chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. “There’s so many layers of things that AI has to understand to then be able to predict what that person may or may not do. And each company has its own individual dataset.”

Kundulli, from Gartner, said that the AI chatter in HR is at the peak of inflated expectations and that a lot of companies that have bought into the virtual assistants are experiencing buyer’s remorse.

“These chatbots often devolved to being FAQs on HR policies,” he said. “The results are not the kind of earth-shattering productivity gains that’s often sold to HR leaders.”

There is one uncomfortable truth here, which is that one way to cut down on the random apps and constant switching would be to have one or two killer solutions that everyone uses, like Microsoft Windows back in the day or Google for search. I’m not promoting a monopoly here, but also, you kind of get why people don’t always hate them — they eliminate the hassles competition can create for consumers and can achieve levels of scale and efficiency that deliver people things they really like (see: Amazon in e-commerce). If every time you switched jobs you had the same HR system that you know how to use and that worked really well and remembered you, it would be kind of nice.

But it’s not certain a monopoly would even work. Bersin pointed out that PeopleSoft, the IBM-backed HR-management system released in the late 1980s, was supposed to be the be-all and end-all, until it wasn’t.

“Everybody loved it. It was really successful. But what they did is as they grew and they started to become very successful, they started to build more and more and more tools on top of it until it also became impossible to use,” he said. “It’s actually really hard to be a monopoly because the use cases are so varied by industry.”

Bersin is in the camp that thinks a bit of disaster is inevitable. “It’s going to be a competitive, dynamic, messy market forever, unfortunately,” he said.

There are ways to make things better on the margins, but none is a panacea — or within employees’ control. Companies can be more strategic about the tech that would be most useful, meaning they make a plan for what they’re trying to accomplish. There are some investments that businesses could make to fix things, too — spending that extra 20% to customize the system or putting together readable training materials that actually explain how things work. Of course, that doesn’t mean people are going to look at those materials or try to figure things out on their own. Candidly, I’ve had jobs where I’ve just given up on certain administrative tasks entirely because I couldn’t figure out how to do them and got tired of trying.

And so here we are, doomed to sit in front of our computers wondering whether the “kudos” we were trying to give our coworker, maybe somewhat as a joke, on whatever stupid app that just got rolled out is worth it, as we’re 20 minutes into the endeavor with no end in sight. Or maybe someday there will be some killer app that will do it all, or we’ll get some AI-powered chatbot to talk to HR about our problems that will make us feel slightly less nuts.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

The deluge of work apps

So you decide to take a vacation from work. You ask your boss, get the go-ahead, and then realize you have no idea how to submit your vacation request. You can barely remember the name of the HR system your company uses, and when you search your inbox to jog your memory, the software you’re confronted with makes you feel like you’ve never used a computer before. It’s fine, though, because your boss doesn’t even understand how to approve the request. A coworker mentions that, after fumbling around the site for what felt like forever, they couldn’t even figure out how to find their salary in it. It almost feels like the person who built the app hasn’t used a computer.

Maybe the above scenario is a slight exaggeration, but to work in America in the year 2024 is to drown in a sea of apps. If you want to take time off, there’s an app for that. And it’s different from the one where you sign up for benefits or submit expenses or handle reviews or do the mental-health exercises that it’s honestly kind of weird your company is pushing on you. Everything is managed by a litany of largely indistinguishable software programs with nearly unpronounceable names that are impossible to navigate. For many workers, managers, and even HR professionals, they’re deeply frustrating and an enormous time suck. The pandemic and the rise of remote work have only made the situation worse. According to a survey of 2,000 organizations by Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm, companies now use an average of 21 HR “modules” — meaning various apps to conquer different tasks — up from 10.4 in 2019.

“You end up with what I call the ‘kitchen drawer’ of HR software,” said Josh Bersin, a global HR analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Co., a consultancy. “You open the kitchen drawer, and you look in there, and you go, ‘What’s all this stuff doing in here? Where did we get it all?’”

How did we get here? For one thing, the HR-software market is a lucrative one; IBISWorld estimates it’s worth $20 billion in the US. It has some big names — Workday, Oracle, ADP — but also a plethora of smaller businesses and platforms, all promising to make managing a workforce better. For companies, managing workers via software instead of human beings is an appealing prospect. Technology and automation have decoupled the size of the company from the number of people required to manage everyone: Instead of having one HR person for every 100 employees, you can, in theory, have one HR person for however big a company gets because of digital systems to handle the scale. The technology is ideally meant to make it so one HR professional can manage administration, compliance, and requests for many more workers than in the on-paper, in-person past.

“HR teams have become more and more lean,” said Ashley Herd, the founder of Manager Method, a training platform for managers. “Frequently I talk to companies and they’ll have 200, 500 employees, and there’s really one or two dedicated HR people, so it’s like an octopus.” Herd added, “Even with all the technology in the world, an HR person’s inbox is crazy.”

If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

With fewer dedicated HR workers, many employees are left to fend for themselves. The problem is that each company has its own systems, and businesses aren’t investing in training employees on those systems. They’ve also decimated the ranks of middle managers who might be able to help. People’s tenures at work are shrinking, too, meaning that by the time they figure all the systems out, they’re on to the next job. This all means that it takes employees longer to get up-to-speed at new gigs and start firing on all cylinders, productivity-wise, because they’re wasting all this time figuring out how to do their jobs instead of just doing them.

“The front office now, in addition to doing its day job, has a proliferation of disparate solutions and disparate combinations of solutions at each company to familiarize with and learn how to use,” said Zachary Chertok, a research manager for employee experience at IDC, a market-intelligence firm.

Whatever the software, the experience for employees is often not great. It feels like a lot of this stuff is designed for the back office without the front office in mind or by people who just don’t really know what a good user experience would be. Management wants to know how many vacation days you took, and it doesn’t care if you had fun putting them into the app, so the app designers tend to deprioritize UX for the frontline employees. Even the big, sprawling tools like UKG and ADP can’t do everything — Harsh Kundulli, a senior director analyst in the HR practice at Gartner, a consultancy, told me that even companies that have invested in big human-capital-management systems still wind up having to use other HR software to fill in the gaps.

The issue isn’t just the people making the programs — it’s the companies buying them. Businesses often put various programs and apps in place without enough forethought. They worry about employee burnout, and instead of addressing what’s going on with their workers, they toss them a mental-health app that no one will ever actually use. Different leaders come in with different ideas about which programs they do and don’t like, and software providers have an incentive to constantly sell businesses new and different features. If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

“There are too many technology solutions out there, all claiming to have all kinds of overlapping capabilities,” Kundulli said. “Many times, HR leaders do not have the insight into the market to be able to orchestrate or to combine the right types of technologies, so they often end up buying many technologies that have overlapping capabilities with redundancies.”

Leaders can get excited about niche systems, too, using the big software for, say, payroll and the smaller, specialized programs for employee training or the initial phases of recruiting. This swinging back and forth makes the whole thing even messier.

“There’s this kind of ongoing cycle in software of bundling and then unbundling,” said Tomer London, the cofounder of Gusto, a payroll and HR platform for small and midsize businesses. His company is in the business of trying to bundle features into something that is, as London put it to me, as “intuitive, easy to use, delightful” as Instagram, which does sound nice. And hey, maybe they’ll get it figured out.

If the HR-software problem were easily solvable, it would probably already be solved. The experts I spoke with about fixes ranged from modestly optimistic to deeply pessimistic about the future of people management by robot. Companies aren’t bringing sprawling HR departments back — they’re too inefficient and expensive. It’s not clear we want to go back to the kind of bad old days of the HR lady filling out your paperwork next to your desk anyway.

“When money’s tight and they want to cut costs to demonstrate that they’re being responsible to their shareholders, they will put in software,” Carrie Bulger, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Quinnipiac University.

Some platforms put a layer over the top of various tools that puts them all in one place so that employees have one portal and don’t realize how many different things they’re dealing with. It’s a sort of artificial Russian nesting doll situation. ServiceNow does that, and some companies have big-enough IT operations that they can create these products on their own, Bersin said — meaning their employees don’t have to touch the shit software they’re actually using.

AI’s not going to fix all of this.

As with so many industries, artificial intelligence is also rearing its head. The hope in HR tech is that AI will be a game changer — that it will lead to a data-analysis revolution and create a fleet of digital assistants that can take care of annoying HR tasks so you don’t have to. Some people I talked with envisioned AI-powered chatbots that can tell workers how to accomplish tasks — basically, you type in “Where do I see my pay stub?” or “How do I submit my expense report?” or maybe put in your vacation request and get it sent straight to your manager.

“Each tool will have its own version of a digital assistant,” Chertok said. “In the near term, you’re still going to have to know which system do I go to for what? But the how is not going to be as much of a challenge because the assistant’s going to be there to help you through it.”

That seems fine and good I suppose, but also, dealing with 10 little chatbots across 10 different tools is not wildly better than where we are. There’s a race to see if someone can create a digital assistant to rule them all — Oracle or ADP or Microsoft’s Copilot — but for now, there’s no clear winner.

Not everyone is so gung ho about AI’s potential. AI needs to have a somewhat clean data source where everything is linked and mapped out and connected, which is not a thing a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, have. Who among us has tried to check some HR policy and been confronted with two dozen versions, the most up-to-date one impossible to tell? The AI might not be able to figure that out either.

“AI’s not going to fix all of this until we sit down and go through the process of mapping and connecting the things we need to understand about our employees and what’s going to do to our business,” said Stacey Harris, chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. “There’s so many layers of things that AI has to understand to then be able to predict what that person may or may not do. And each company has its own individual dataset.”

Kundulli, from Gartner, said that the AI chatter in HR is at the peak of inflated expectations and that a lot of companies that have bought into the virtual assistants are experiencing buyer’s remorse.

“These chatbots often devolved to being FAQs on HR policies,” he said. “The results are not the kind of earth-shattering productivity gains that’s often sold to HR leaders.”

There is one uncomfortable truth here, which is that one way to cut down on the random apps and constant switching would be to have one or two killer solutions that everyone uses, like Microsoft Windows back in the day or Google for search. I’m not promoting a monopoly here, but also, you kind of get why people don’t always hate them — they eliminate the hassles competition can create for consumers and can achieve levels of scale and efficiency that deliver people things they really like (see: Amazon in e-commerce). If every time you switched jobs you had the same HR system that you know how to use and that worked really well and remembered you, it would be kind of nice.

But it’s not certain a monopoly would even work. Bersin pointed out that PeopleSoft, the IBM-backed HR-management system released in the late 1980s, was supposed to be the be-all and end-all, until it wasn’t.

“Everybody loved it. It was really successful. But what they did is as they grew and they started to become very successful, they started to build more and more and more tools on top of it until it also became impossible to use,” he said. “It’s actually really hard to be a monopoly because the use cases are so varied by industry.”

Bersin is in the camp that thinks a bit of disaster is inevitable. “It’s going to be a competitive, dynamic, messy market forever, unfortunately,” he said.

There are ways to make things better on the margins, but none is a panacea — or within employees’ control. Companies can be more strategic about the tech that would be most useful, meaning they make a plan for what they’re trying to accomplish. There are some investments that businesses could make to fix things, too — spending that extra 20% to customize the system or putting together readable training materials that actually explain how things work. Of course, that doesn’t mean people are going to look at those materials or try to figure things out on their own. Candidly, I’ve had jobs where I’ve just given up on certain administrative tasks entirely because I couldn’t figure out how to do them and got tired of trying.

And so here we are, doomed to sit in front of our computers wondering whether the “kudos” we were trying to give our coworker, maybe somewhat as a joke, on whatever stupid app that just got rolled out is worth it, as we’re 20 minutes into the endeavor with no end in sight. Or maybe someday there will be some killer app that will do it all, or we’ll get some AI-powered chatbot to talk to HR about our problems that will make us feel slightly less nuts.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Best business intelligence platform of 2024

The best business intelligence platforms make it simple and easy to mine data for insights to communicate to stakeholders.

Now that organizations can now collect data on every aspect of their business, from sales and marketing, to workflows and productivity, to hiring and HR, to overall performance and profitability, the ability to sort through all this data for real and actionable insights has never been so important.

However, many of these data points exist in isolation and require dedicated business intelligence (BI) tools to tie in key information from each angle into an overall whole.

This can then allow for real insights and predictions for improving business performance, not least through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A number of software packages also come with their own analytics, but these can also often be exported into a business intelligence platform.

Even more importantly, the best BI software will be driven by visualizations you can share with stakeholders, to help communicate sometimes complex statistics as easy to understand charts and diagrams.

Here then are the best business intelligence tools for business currently available.

We’ve also highlighted the best productivity gadgets for business.

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Best free business intelligence platform

(Image credit: Microsoft)

1. Microsoft Power BI

The software giant provides a free business intelligence tool

Reasons to buy+

Free Tier

+

Affordable cost

Reasons to avoid-

Requires software download

Software behemoth, Microsoft, also plays in the business intelligence tool space, and their offering is Microsoft Power BI. They even have a Microsoft Business Applications Summit that features their Power BI, and not surprisingly other Microsoft business applications. Unlike some of their competition that take a totally web-based portal approach, Power BI also offers downloadable software, so you can run your analytics either in the cloud or via a reporting server.

There is a generous sixty day trial of the software, which promises to “Connect hundreds of data sources,” including Microsoft applications, and other sources such as Facebook, Sybase and Oracle which can then prep data for subsequent data analysis on the fly, allowing reports to be created in just a matter of minutes.

Pricing begins at the Power BI Desktop tier for a single user, which is fully functional, and free. The next tier up is Power BI Pro and supports collaboration between users, and real time data analysis, and includes a 60 day trial.

Take a look at our Microsoft discount codes for the best Microsoft offers and savings.

Best business intelligence platform for analytics

(Image credit: Tableau)

2. Tableau Desktop

Strong visuals and real-time analytics

Reasons to buy+

Free trial offer

+

Slick interface with drag and drop buttons

Tableau Desktop endeavors to do more than make charts, but rather to show “live visual analytics.” A slick interface with drag and drop buttons allows the user to quickly be able to spot trends in the data. There is a lengthy list of supported data sources, including Microsoft Excel, Google Analytics, Box and PDF files.

Tableau enjoys the ability to connect with pretty much any type of database, as well as use a whole range of data blending options, to output into an even bigger selection of charts. Dashboard visualizations can be easily shared, and are mobile friendly.

Tableau Desktop becomes an expensive option for a single user, making this more expensive than other competing solutions. On balance, it also includes the associated application of Tableau Prep under the Tableau Creator package.

Best simple business intelligence platform

(Image credit: Dundas)

3. Dundas BI

An experienced and simple to use BI tool

Reasons to buy+

Browser based

+

Drag and drop interface

+

Free 45 day trial

Dundas is a browser based business intelligence tool with 25 years of experience. It is designed to be a single tool to transform data into visual data analytics with “granular control over almost all visual design elements.”

Data files can be incorporated with drag and drop functionality allowing end users to analyze data without involvement from IT. The HTML5 interface allows it to be used across a variety, including mobile, devices.

There is a free 45 day trial, but after the pricing is opaque and requires a quote, but there are options to lease annually, or own for perpetuity.

Best web-based business intelligence platform

(Image credit: Zoho)

4. Zoho Analytics

A tool from folks that have a cloud-based approach in their DNA

Reasons to buy+

Support to collect data from many sources

+

Visually attractive dashboard

+

Availability of free trial

Reasons to avoid-

Requires purchase on annual basis

Zoho Analytics is the business intelligence tool from the folks that have plenty of experience with web-based business tools, namely the venerable Zoho Office. Zoho Reports is a robust solution, that can integrate data from a variety of files, including Microsoft Office documents, URL feeds, and databases, such as MySQL, along with applications, of course from Zoho, but also outside their ecosystem including data from the cloud from Box, DropBox, Google Drive and other applications (for example Salesforce, Quickbooks and Google Analytics).

Data can then be blended via integrated mathematical and statistical formulas, for example marketing costs in an Excel file, with sales data in a cloud database, to create a visually attractive and informative report. This is all done via a simple online interface, and functions can be applied via a simple drag and drop, with reports that can be easily viewed via the portal, or also printed or emailed.

Best business intelligence platform for enterprises

(Image credit: Sisense)

5. Sisense

The business intelligence tool of Fortune 500 companies

Reasons to buy+

Rapid deployment

+

Incorporates AI

+

White label analytics

SiSense is a business intelligence tool that seeks to simplify the complexities of data analysis by building in IoT, machine learning and AI into their platform. They claim it is so simple and streamlined, that you can go from “data to dashboard in just 90 minutes.” While we can argue the validity of that claim, their list of clients, including the likes of GE, Philips, Fujitsu, NBC and Airbus would back up that this is a top tier product.

Main features include the ability to embed white label analytics with customizations, mashup live or cached data, analyze data across your entire landscape or focus on specific areas such as object, data, or system.

Sisense is an enterprise BI program that can be run in the cloud, or on premises. However, there no flat-rate pricing is provided for either model. Their custom pricing is based on an annual subscription model, but it requires a price quote, and is unfortunately not available on their website.

We’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to BI, as there are many providers in the market. However, the caveat is always that a software platform is only as good as its programmers, and data always needs to be the best quality – too many managers presume that processes and workflows are being correctly followed when they may not be and therefore undermine analyzes. Additionally, while there are comprehensive BI tools available there are also ones that focus on particular areas, such as sales or distribution, in order to provide more detailed and focused insights:

Looker is another full-spectrum analytics and business intelligence platform that provides real-time reporting. To get the most out of it some MySQL knowledge would be helpful, but training materials are provided as required. Even without, Looker is an easy to use platform for data discovery that can accommodate a number of third-party sources.

Qualtrics Research Core is more focused on working through developing, collating, and analyzing survey data, and uses its own AI to tease out trends and actionable insights. This can be especially useful when applied to sales and marketing campaigns for analyzing not just results but can also be used to identify ideal price points.

Adobe Analytics is a tool especially dedicated to tracking the customer journey online, and provides data to analyze how to more effectively engage with them according to their sources, ie, social media. It’s able to work with complex databases to generate quick results, which can then be exported or printed easily.

We’ve also featured the best business laptops.

Best business intelligence platform FAQsWhich business intelligence platform is best for you?

When deciding which business intelligence platform to download and use, first consider what your actual needs are, as sometimes cheaper software may only provide basic options, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a more expensive platform is much more worthwhile. Additionally, higher-end software can really cater for every need, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require from your business intelligence platform.

How we tested the best business intelligence platform

To test for the best business intelligence platform we first set up an account with the relevant software provider, then tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations, analyzing data from different sources and looking at different ways to present the results. The aim was to push each business intelligence platform platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.

Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.

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The deluge of work apps

So you decide to take a vacation from work. You ask your boss, get the go-ahead, and then realize you have no idea how to submit your vacation request. You can barely remember the name of the HR system your company uses, and when you search your inbox to jog your memory, the software you’re confronted with makes you feel like you’ve never used a computer before. It’s fine, though, because your boss doesn’t even understand how to approve the request. A coworker mentions that, after fumbling around the site for what felt like forever, they couldn’t even figure out how to find their salary in it. It almost feels like the person who built the app hasn’t used a computer.

Maybe the above scenario is a slight exaggeration, but to work in America in the year 2024 is to drown in a sea of apps. If you want to take time off, there’s an app for that. And it’s different from the one where you sign up for benefits or submit expenses or handle reviews or do the mental-health exercises that it’s honestly kind of weird your company is pushing on you. Everything is managed by a litany of largely indistinguishable software programs with nearly unpronounceable names that are impossible to navigate. For many workers, managers, and even HR professionals, they’re deeply frustrating and an enormous time suck. The pandemic and the rise of remote work have only made the situation worse. According to a survey of 2,000 organizations by Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm, companies now use an average of 21 HR “modules” — meaning various apps to conquer different tasks — up from 10.4 in 2019.

“You end up with what I call the ‘kitchen drawer’ of HR software,” said Josh Bersin, a global HR analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Co., a consultancy. “You open the kitchen drawer, and you look in there, and you go, ‘What’s all this stuff doing in here? Where did we get it all?’”

How did we get here? For one thing, the HR-software market is a lucrative one; IBISWorld estimates it’s worth $20 billion in the US. It has some big names — Workday, Oracle, ADP — but also a plethora of smaller businesses and platforms, all promising to make managing a workforce better. For companies, managing workers via software instead of human beings is an appealing prospect. Technology and automation have decoupled the size of the company from the number of people required to manage everyone: Instead of having one HR person for every 100 employees, you can, in theory, have one HR person for however big a company gets because of digital systems to handle the scale. The technology is ideally meant to make it so one HR professional can manage administration, compliance, and requests for many more workers than in the on-paper, in-person past.

“HR teams have become more and more lean,” said Ashley Herd, the founder of Manager Method, a training platform for managers. “Frequently I talk to companies and they’ll have 200, 500 employees, and there’s really one or two dedicated HR people, so it’s like an octopus.” Herd added, “Even with all the technology in the world, an HR person’s inbox is crazy.”

If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

With fewer dedicated HR workers, many employees are left to fend for themselves. The problem is that each company has its own systems, and businesses aren’t investing in training employees on those systems. They’ve also decimated the ranks of middle managers who might be able to help. People’s tenures at work are shrinking, too, meaning that by the time they figure all the systems out, they’re on to the next job. This all means that it takes employees longer to get up-to-speed at new gigs and start firing on all cylinders, productivity-wise, because they’re wasting all this time figuring out how to do their jobs instead of just doing them.

“The front office now, in addition to doing its day job, has a proliferation of disparate solutions and disparate combinations of solutions at each company to familiarize with and learn how to use,” said Zachary Chertok, a research manager for employee experience at IDC, a market-intelligence firm.

Whatever the software, the experience for employees is often not great. It feels like a lot of this stuff is designed for the back office without the front office in mind or by people who just don’t really know what a good user experience would be. Management wants to know how many vacation days you took, and it doesn’t care if you had fun putting them into the app, so the app designers tend to deprioritize UX for the frontline employees. Even the big, sprawling tools like UKG and ADP can’t do everything — Harsh Kundulli, a senior director analyst in the HR practice at Gartner, a consultancy, told me that even companies that have invested in big human-capital-management systems still wind up having to use other HR software to fill in the gaps.

The issue isn’t just the people making the programs — it’s the companies buying them. Businesses often put various programs and apps in place without enough forethought. They worry about employee burnout, and instead of addressing what’s going on with their workers, they toss them a mental-health app that no one will ever actually use. Different leaders come in with different ideas about which programs they do and don’t like, and software providers have an incentive to constantly sell businesses new and different features. If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

“There are too many technology solutions out there, all claiming to have all kinds of overlapping capabilities,” Kundulli said. “Many times, HR leaders do not have the insight into the market to be able to orchestrate or to combine the right types of technologies, so they often end up buying many technologies that have overlapping capabilities with redundancies.”

Leaders can get excited about niche systems, too, using the big software for, say, payroll and the smaller, specialized programs for employee training or the initial phases of recruiting. This swinging back and forth makes the whole thing even messier.

“There’s this kind of ongoing cycle in software of bundling and then unbundling,” said Tomer London, the cofounder of Gusto, a payroll and HR platform for small and midsize businesses. His company is in the business of trying to bundle features into something that is, as London put it to me, as “intuitive, easy to use, delightful” as Instagram, which does sound nice. And hey, maybe they’ll get it figured out.

If the HR-software problem were easily solvable, it would probably already be solved. The experts I spoke with about fixes ranged from modestly optimistic to deeply pessimistic about the future of people management by robot. Companies aren’t bringing sprawling HR departments back — they’re too inefficient and expensive. It’s not clear we want to go back to the kind of bad old days of the HR lady filling out your paperwork next to your desk anyway.

“When money’s tight and they want to cut costs to demonstrate that they’re being responsible to their shareholders, they will put in software,” Carrie Bulger, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Quinnipiac University.

Some platforms put a layer over the top of various tools that puts them all in one place so that employees have one portal and don’t realize how many different things they’re dealing with. It’s a sort of artificial Russian nesting doll situation. ServiceNow does that, and some companies have big-enough IT operations that they can create these products on their own, Bersin said — meaning their employees don’t have to touch the shit software they’re actually using.

AI’s not going to fix all of this.

As with so many industries, artificial intelligence is also rearing its head. The hope in HR tech is that AI will be a game changer — that it will lead to a data-analysis revolution and create a fleet of digital assistants that can take care of annoying HR tasks so you don’t have to. Some people I talked with envisioned AI-powered chatbots that can tell workers how to accomplish tasks — basically, you type in “Where do I see my pay stub?” or “How do I submit my expense report?” or maybe put in your vacation request and get it sent straight to your manager.

“Each tool will have its own version of a digital assistant,” Chertok said. “In the near term, you’re still going to have to know which system do I go to for what? But the how is not going to be as much of a challenge because the assistant’s going to be there to help you through it.”

That seems fine and good I suppose, but also, dealing with 10 little chatbots across 10 different tools is not wildly better than where we are. There’s a race to see if someone can create a digital assistant to rule them all — Oracle or ADP or Microsoft’s Copilot — but for now, there’s no clear winner.

Not everyone is so gung ho about AI’s potential. AI needs to have a somewhat clean data source where everything is linked and mapped out and connected, which is not a thing a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, have. Who among us has tried to check some HR policy and been confronted with two dozen versions, the most up-to-date one impossible to tell? The AI might not be able to figure that out either.

“AI’s not going to fix all of this until we sit down and go through the process of mapping and connecting the things we need to understand about our employees and what’s going to do to our business,” said Stacey Harris, chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. “There’s so many layers of things that AI has to understand to then be able to predict what that person may or may not do. And each company has its own individual dataset.”

Kundulli, from Gartner, said that the AI chatter in HR is at the peak of inflated expectations and that a lot of companies that have bought into the virtual assistants are experiencing buyer’s remorse.

“These chatbots often devolved to being FAQs on HR policies,” he said. “The results are not the kind of earth-shattering productivity gains that’s often sold to HR leaders.”

There is one uncomfortable truth here, which is that one way to cut down on the random apps and constant switching would be to have one or two killer solutions that everyone uses, like Microsoft Windows back in the day or Google for search. I’m not promoting a monopoly here, but also, you kind of get why people don’t always hate them — they eliminate the hassles competition can create for consumers and can achieve levels of scale and efficiency that deliver people things they really like (see: Amazon in e-commerce). If every time you switched jobs you had the same HR system that you know how to use and that worked really well and remembered you, it would be kind of nice.

But it’s not certain a monopoly would even work. Bersin pointed out that PeopleSoft, the IBM-backed HR-management system released in the late 1980s, was supposed to be the be-all and end-all, until it wasn’t.

“Everybody loved it. It was really successful. But what they did is as they grew and they started to become very successful, they started to build more and more and more tools on top of it until it also became impossible to use,” he said. “It’s actually really hard to be a monopoly because the use cases are so varied by industry.”

Bersin is in the camp that thinks a bit of disaster is inevitable. “It’s going to be a competitive, dynamic, messy market forever, unfortunately,” he said.

There are ways to make things better on the margins, but none is a panacea — or within employees’ control. Companies can be more strategic about the tech that would be most useful, meaning they make a plan for what they’re trying to accomplish. There are some investments that businesses could make to fix things, too — spending that extra 20% to customize the system or putting together readable training materials that actually explain how things work. Of course, that doesn’t mean people are going to look at those materials or try to figure things out on their own. Candidly, I’ve had jobs where I’ve just given up on certain administrative tasks entirely because I couldn’t figure out how to do them and got tired of trying.

And so here we are, doomed to sit in front of our computers wondering whether the “kudos” we were trying to give our coworker, maybe somewhat as a joke, on whatever stupid app that just got rolled out is worth it, as we’re 20 minutes into the endeavor with no end in sight. Or maybe someday there will be some killer app that will do it all, or we’ll get some AI-powered chatbot to talk to HR about our problems that will make us feel slightly less nuts.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

The deluge of work apps

So you decide to take a vacation from work. You ask your boss, get the go-ahead, and then realize you have no idea how to submit your vacation request. You can barely remember the name of the HR system your company uses, and when you search your inbox to jog your memory, the software you’re confronted with makes you feel like you’ve never used a computer before. It’s fine, though, because your boss doesn’t even understand how to approve the request. A coworker mentions that, after fumbling around the site for what felt like forever, they couldn’t even figure out how to find their salary in it. It almost feels like the person who built the app hasn’t used a computer.

Maybe the above scenario is a slight exaggeration, but to work in America in the year 2024 is to drown in a sea of apps. If you want to take time off, there’s an app for that. And it’s different from the one where you sign up for benefits or submit expenses or handle reviews or do the mental-health exercises that it’s honestly kind of weird your company is pushing on you. Everything is managed by a litany of largely indistinguishable software programs with nearly unpronounceable names that are impossible to navigate. For many workers, managers, and even HR professionals, they’re deeply frustrating and an enormous time suck. The pandemic and the rise of remote work have only made the situation worse. According to a survey of 2,000 organizations by Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm, companies now use an average of 21 HR “modules” — meaning various apps to conquer different tasks — up from 10.4 in 2019.

“You end up with what I call the ‘kitchen drawer’ of HR software,” said Josh Bersin, a global HR analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Co., a consultancy. “You open the kitchen drawer, and you look in there, and you go, ‘What’s all this stuff doing in here? Where did we get it all?’”

How did we get here? For one thing, the HR-software market is a lucrative one; IBISWorld estimates it’s worth $20 billion in the US. It has some big names — Workday, Oracle, ADP — but also a plethora of smaller businesses and platforms, all promising to make managing a workforce better. For companies, managing workers via software instead of human beings is an appealing prospect. Technology and automation have decoupled the size of the company from the number of people required to manage everyone: Instead of having one HR person for every 100 employees, you can, in theory, have one HR person for however big a company gets because of digital systems to handle the scale. The technology is ideally meant to make it so one HR professional can manage administration, compliance, and requests for many more workers than in the on-paper, in-person past.

“HR teams have become more and more lean,” said Ashley Herd, the founder of Manager Method, a training platform for managers. “Frequently I talk to companies and they’ll have 200, 500 employees, and there’s really one or two dedicated HR people, so it’s like an octopus.” Herd added, “Even with all the technology in the world, an HR person’s inbox is crazy.”

If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

With fewer dedicated HR workers, many employees are left to fend for themselves. The problem is that each company has its own systems, and businesses aren’t investing in training employees on those systems. They’ve also decimated the ranks of middle managers who might be able to help. People’s tenures at work are shrinking, too, meaning that by the time they figure all the systems out, they’re on to the next job. This all means that it takes employees longer to get up-to-speed at new gigs and start firing on all cylinders, productivity-wise, because they’re wasting all this time figuring out how to do their jobs instead of just doing them.

“The front office now, in addition to doing its day job, has a proliferation of disparate solutions and disparate combinations of solutions at each company to familiarize with and learn how to use,” said Zachary Chertok, a research manager for employee experience at IDC, a market-intelligence firm.

Whatever the software, the experience for employees is often not great. It feels like a lot of this stuff is designed for the back office without the front office in mind or by people who just don’t really know what a good user experience would be. Management wants to know how many vacation days you took, and it doesn’t care if you had fun putting them into the app, so the app designers tend to deprioritize UX for the frontline employees. Even the big, sprawling tools like UKG and ADP can’t do everything — Harsh Kundulli, a senior director analyst in the HR practice at Gartner, a consultancy, told me that even companies that have invested in big human-capital-management systems still wind up having to use other HR software to fill in the gaps.

The issue isn’t just the people making the programs — it’s the companies buying them. Businesses often put various programs and apps in place without enough forethought. They worry about employee burnout, and instead of addressing what’s going on with their workers, they toss them a mental-health app that no one will ever actually use. Different leaders come in with different ideas about which programs they do and don’t like, and software providers have an incentive to constantly sell businesses new and different features. If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

“There are too many technology solutions out there, all claiming to have all kinds of overlapping capabilities,” Kundulli said. “Many times, HR leaders do not have the insight into the market to be able to orchestrate or to combine the right types of technologies, so they often end up buying many technologies that have overlapping capabilities with redundancies.”

Leaders can get excited about niche systems, too, using the big software for, say, payroll and the smaller, specialized programs for employee training or the initial phases of recruiting. This swinging back and forth makes the whole thing even messier.

“There’s this kind of ongoing cycle in software of bundling and then unbundling,” said Tomer London, the cofounder of Gusto, a payroll and HR platform for small and midsize businesses. His company is in the business of trying to bundle features into something that is, as London put it to me, as “intuitive, easy to use, delightful” as Instagram, which does sound nice. And hey, maybe they’ll get it figured out.

If the HR-software problem were easily solvable, it would probably already be solved. The experts I spoke with about fixes ranged from modestly optimistic to deeply pessimistic about the future of people management by robot. Companies aren’t bringing sprawling HR departments back — they’re too inefficient and expensive. It’s not clear we want to go back to the kind of bad old days of the HR lady filling out your paperwork next to your desk anyway.

“When money’s tight and they want to cut costs to demonstrate that they’re being responsible to their shareholders, they will put in software,” Carrie Bulger, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Quinnipiac University.

Some platforms put a layer over the top of various tools that puts them all in one place so that employees have one portal and don’t realize how many different things they’re dealing with. It’s a sort of artificial Russian nesting doll situation. ServiceNow does that, and some companies have big-enough IT operations that they can create these products on their own, Bersin said — meaning their employees don’t have to touch the shit software they’re actually using.

AI’s not going to fix all of this.

As with so many industries, artificial intelligence is also rearing its head. The hope in HR tech is that AI will be a game changer — that it will lead to a data-analysis revolution and create a fleet of digital assistants that can take care of annoying HR tasks so you don’t have to. Some people I talked with envisioned AI-powered chatbots that can tell workers how to accomplish tasks — basically, you type in “Where do I see my pay stub?” or “How do I submit my expense report?” or maybe put in your vacation request and get it sent straight to your manager.

“Each tool will have its own version of a digital assistant,” Chertok said. “In the near term, you’re still going to have to know which system do I go to for what? But the how is not going to be as much of a challenge because the assistant’s going to be there to help you through it.”

That seems fine and good I suppose, but also, dealing with 10 little chatbots across 10 different tools is not wildly better than where we are. There’s a race to see if someone can create a digital assistant to rule them all — Oracle or ADP or Microsoft’s Copilot — but for now, there’s no clear winner.

Not everyone is so gung ho about AI’s potential. AI needs to have a somewhat clean data source where everything is linked and mapped out and connected, which is not a thing a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, have. Who among us has tried to check some HR policy and been confronted with two dozen versions, the most up-to-date one impossible to tell? The AI might not be able to figure that out either.

“AI’s not going to fix all of this until we sit down and go through the process of mapping and connecting the things we need to understand about our employees and what’s going to do to our business,” said Stacey Harris, chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. “There’s so many layers of things that AI has to understand to then be able to predict what that person may or may not do. And each company has its own individual dataset.”

Kundulli, from Gartner, said that the AI chatter in HR is at the peak of inflated expectations and that a lot of companies that have bought into the virtual assistants are experiencing buyer’s remorse.

“These chatbots often devolved to being FAQs on HR policies,” he said. “The results are not the kind of earth-shattering productivity gains that’s often sold to HR leaders.”

There is one uncomfortable truth here, which is that one way to cut down on the random apps and constant switching would be to have one or two killer solutions that everyone uses, like Microsoft Windows back in the day or Google for search. I’m not promoting a monopoly here, but also, you kind of get why people don’t always hate them — they eliminate the hassles competition can create for consumers and can achieve levels of scale and efficiency that deliver people things they really like (see: Amazon in e-commerce). If every time you switched jobs you had the same HR system that you know how to use and that worked really well and remembered you, it would be kind of nice.

But it’s not certain a monopoly would even work. Bersin pointed out that PeopleSoft, the IBM-backed HR-management system released in the late 1980s, was supposed to be the be-all and end-all, until it wasn’t.

“Everybody loved it. It was really successful. But what they did is as they grew and they started to become very successful, they started to build more and more and more tools on top of it until it also became impossible to use,” he said. “It’s actually really hard to be a monopoly because the use cases are so varied by industry.”

Bersin is in the camp that thinks a bit of disaster is inevitable. “It’s going to be a competitive, dynamic, messy market forever, unfortunately,” he said.

There are ways to make things better on the margins, but none is a panacea — or within employees’ control. Companies can be more strategic about the tech that would be most useful, meaning they make a plan for what they’re trying to accomplish. There are some investments that businesses could make to fix things, too — spending that extra 20% to customize the system or putting together readable training materials that actually explain how things work. Of course, that doesn’t mean people are going to look at those materials or try to figure things out on their own. Candidly, I’ve had jobs where I’ve just given up on certain administrative tasks entirely because I couldn’t figure out how to do them and got tired of trying.

And so here we are, doomed to sit in front of our computers wondering whether the “kudos” we were trying to give our coworker, maybe somewhat as a joke, on whatever stupid app that just got rolled out is worth it, as we’re 20 minutes into the endeavor with no end in sight. Or maybe someday there will be some killer app that will do it all, or we’ll get some AI-powered chatbot to talk to HR about our problems that will make us feel slightly less nuts.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

The deluge of work apps

So you decide to take a vacation from work. You ask your boss, get the go-ahead, and then realize you have no idea how to submit your vacation request. You can barely remember the name of the HR system your company uses, and when you search your inbox to jog your memory, the software you’re confronted with makes you feel like you’ve never used a computer before. It’s fine, though, because your boss doesn’t even understand how to approve the request. A coworker mentions that, after fumbling around the site for what felt like forever, they couldn’t even figure out how to find their salary in it. It almost feels like the person who built the app hasn’t used a computer.

Maybe the above scenario is a slight exaggeration, but to work in America in the year 2024 is to drown in a sea of apps. If you want to take time off, there’s an app for that. And it’s different from the one where you sign up for benefits or submit expenses or handle reviews or do the mental-health exercises that it’s honestly kind of weird your company is pushing on you. Everything is managed by a litany of largely indistinguishable software programs with nearly unpronounceable names that are impossible to navigate. For many workers, managers, and even HR professionals, they’re deeply frustrating and an enormous time suck. The pandemic and the rise of remote work have only made the situation worse. According to a survey of 2,000 organizations by Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm, companies now use an average of 21 HR “modules” — meaning various apps to conquer different tasks — up from 10.4 in 2019.

“You end up with what I call the ‘kitchen drawer’ of HR software,” said Josh Bersin, a global HR analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Co., a consultancy. “You open the kitchen drawer, and you look in there, and you go, ‘What’s all this stuff doing in here? Where did we get it all?’”

How did we get here? For one thing, the HR-software market is a lucrative one; IBISWorld estimates it’s worth $20 billion in the US. It has some big names — Workday, Oracle, ADP — but also a plethora of smaller businesses and platforms, all promising to make managing a workforce better. For companies, managing workers via software instead of human beings is an appealing prospect. Technology and automation have decoupled the size of the company from the number of people required to manage everyone: Instead of having one HR person for every 100 employees, you can, in theory, have one HR person for however big a company gets because of digital systems to handle the scale. The technology is ideally meant to make it so one HR professional can manage administration, compliance, and requests for many more workers than in the on-paper, in-person past.

“HR teams have become more and more lean,” said Ashley Herd, the founder of Manager Method, a training platform for managers. “Frequently I talk to companies and they’ll have 200, 500 employees, and there’s really one or two dedicated HR people, so it’s like an octopus.” Herd added, “Even with all the technology in the world, an HR person’s inbox is crazy.”

If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

With fewer dedicated HR workers, many employees are left to fend for themselves. The problem is that each company has its own systems, and businesses aren’t investing in training employees on those systems. They’ve also decimated the ranks of middle managers who might be able to help. People’s tenures at work are shrinking, too, meaning that by the time they figure all the systems out, they’re on to the next job. This all means that it takes employees longer to get up-to-speed at new gigs and start firing on all cylinders, productivity-wise, because they’re wasting all this time figuring out how to do their jobs instead of just doing them.

“The front office now, in addition to doing its day job, has a proliferation of disparate solutions and disparate combinations of solutions at each company to familiarize with and learn how to use,” said Zachary Chertok, a research manager for employee experience at IDC, a market-intelligence firm.

Whatever the software, the experience for employees is often not great. It feels like a lot of this stuff is designed for the back office without the front office in mind or by people who just don’t really know what a good user experience would be. Management wants to know how many vacation days you took, and it doesn’t care if you had fun putting them into the app, so the app designers tend to deprioritize UX for the frontline employees. Even the big, sprawling tools like UKG and ADP can’t do everything — Harsh Kundulli, a senior director analyst in the HR practice at Gartner, a consultancy, told me that even companies that have invested in big human-capital-management systems still wind up having to use other HR software to fill in the gaps.

The issue isn’t just the people making the programs — it’s the companies buying them. Businesses often put various programs and apps in place without enough forethought. They worry about employee burnout, and instead of addressing what’s going on with their workers, they toss them a mental-health app that no one will ever actually use. Different leaders come in with different ideas about which programs they do and don’t like, and software providers have an incentive to constantly sell businesses new and different features. If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

“There are too many technology solutions out there, all claiming to have all kinds of overlapping capabilities,” Kundulli said. “Many times, HR leaders do not have the insight into the market to be able to orchestrate or to combine the right types of technologies, so they often end up buying many technologies that have overlapping capabilities with redundancies.”

Leaders can get excited about niche systems, too, using the big software for, say, payroll and the smaller, specialized programs for employee training or the initial phases of recruiting. This swinging back and forth makes the whole thing even messier.

“There’s this kind of ongoing cycle in software of bundling and then unbundling,” said Tomer London, the cofounder of Gusto, a payroll and HR platform for small and midsize businesses. His company is in the business of trying to bundle features into something that is, as London put it to me, as “intuitive, easy to use, delightful” as Instagram, which does sound nice. And hey, maybe they’ll get it figured out.

If the HR-software problem were easily solvable, it would probably already be solved. The experts I spoke with about fixes ranged from modestly optimistic to deeply pessimistic about the future of people management by robot. Companies aren’t bringing sprawling HR departments back — they’re too inefficient and expensive. It’s not clear we want to go back to the kind of bad old days of the HR lady filling out your paperwork next to your desk anyway.

“When money’s tight and they want to cut costs to demonstrate that they’re being responsible to their shareholders, they will put in software,” Carrie Bulger, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Quinnipiac University.

Some platforms put a layer over the top of various tools that puts them all in one place so that employees have one portal and don’t realize how many different things they’re dealing with. It’s a sort of artificial Russian nesting doll situation. ServiceNow does that, and some companies have big-enough IT operations that they can create these products on their own, Bersin said — meaning their employees don’t have to touch the shit software they’re actually using.

AI’s not going to fix all of this.

As with so many industries, artificial intelligence is also rearing its head. The hope in HR tech is that AI will be a game changer — that it will lead to a data-analysis revolution and create a fleet of digital assistants that can take care of annoying HR tasks so you don’t have to. Some people I talked with envisioned AI-powered chatbots that can tell workers how to accomplish tasks — basically, you type in “Where do I see my pay stub?” or “How do I submit my expense report?” or maybe put in your vacation request and get it sent straight to your manager.

“Each tool will have its own version of a digital assistant,” Chertok said. “In the near term, you’re still going to have to know which system do I go to for what? But the how is not going to be as much of a challenge because the assistant’s going to be there to help you through it.”

That seems fine and good I suppose, but also, dealing with 10 little chatbots across 10 different tools is not wildly better than where we are. There’s a race to see if someone can create a digital assistant to rule them all — Oracle or ADP or Microsoft’s Copilot — but for now, there’s no clear winner.

Not everyone is so gung ho about AI’s potential. AI needs to have a somewhat clean data source where everything is linked and mapped out and connected, which is not a thing a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, have. Who among us has tried to check some HR policy and been confronted with two dozen versions, the most up-to-date one impossible to tell? The AI might not be able to figure that out either.

“AI’s not going to fix all of this until we sit down and go through the process of mapping and connecting the things we need to understand about our employees and what’s going to do to our business,” said Stacey Harris, chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. “There’s so many layers of things that AI has to understand to then be able to predict what that person may or may not do. And each company has its own individual dataset.”

Kundulli, from Gartner, said that the AI chatter in HR is at the peak of inflated expectations and that a lot of companies that have bought into the virtual assistants are experiencing buyer’s remorse.

“These chatbots often devolved to being FAQs on HR policies,” he said. “The results are not the kind of earth-shattering productivity gains that’s often sold to HR leaders.”

There is one uncomfortable truth here, which is that one way to cut down on the random apps and constant switching would be to have one or two killer solutions that everyone uses, like Microsoft Windows back in the day or Google for search. I’m not promoting a monopoly here, but also, you kind of get why people don’t always hate them — they eliminate the hassles competition can create for consumers and can achieve levels of scale and efficiency that deliver people things they really like (see: Amazon in e-commerce). If every time you switched jobs you had the same HR system that you know how to use and that worked really well and remembered you, it would be kind of nice.

But it’s not certain a monopoly would even work. Bersin pointed out that PeopleSoft, the IBM-backed HR-management system released in the late 1980s, was supposed to be the be-all and end-all, until it wasn’t.

“Everybody loved it. It was really successful. But what they did is as they grew and they started to become very successful, they started to build more and more and more tools on top of it until it also became impossible to use,” he said. “It’s actually really hard to be a monopoly because the use cases are so varied by industry.”

Bersin is in the camp that thinks a bit of disaster is inevitable. “It’s going to be a competitive, dynamic, messy market forever, unfortunately,” he said.

There are ways to make things better on the margins, but none is a panacea — or within employees’ control. Companies can be more strategic about the tech that would be most useful, meaning they make a plan for what they’re trying to accomplish. There are some investments that businesses could make to fix things, too — spending that extra 20% to customize the system or putting together readable training materials that actually explain how things work. Of course, that doesn’t mean people are going to look at those materials or try to figure things out on their own. Candidly, I’ve had jobs where I’ve just given up on certain administrative tasks entirely because I couldn’t figure out how to do them and got tired of trying.

And so here we are, doomed to sit in front of our computers wondering whether the “kudos” we were trying to give our coworker, maybe somewhat as a joke, on whatever stupid app that just got rolled out is worth it, as we’re 20 minutes into the endeavor with no end in sight. Or maybe someday there will be some killer app that will do it all, or we’ll get some AI-powered chatbot to talk to HR about our problems that will make us feel slightly less nuts.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

The deluge of work apps

So you decide to take a vacation from work. You ask your boss, get the go-ahead, and then realize you have no idea how to submit your vacation request. You can barely remember the name of the HR system your company uses, and when you search your inbox to jog your memory, the software you’re confronted with makes you feel like you’ve never used a computer before. It’s fine, though, because your boss doesn’t even understand how to approve the request. A coworker mentions that, after fumbling around the site for what felt like forever, they couldn’t even figure out how to find their salary in it. It almost feels like the person who built the app hasn’t used a computer.

Maybe the above scenario is a slight exaggeration, but to work in America in the year 2024 is to drown in a sea of apps. If you want to take time off, there’s an app for that. And it’s different from the one where you sign up for benefits or submit expenses or handle reviews or do the mental-health exercises that it’s honestly kind of weird your company is pushing on you. Everything is managed by a litany of largely indistinguishable software programs with nearly unpronounceable names that are impossible to navigate. For many workers, managers, and even HR professionals, they’re deeply frustrating and an enormous time suck. The pandemic and the rise of remote work have only made the situation worse. According to a survey of 2,000 organizations by Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm, companies now use an average of 21 HR “modules” — meaning various apps to conquer different tasks — up from 10.4 in 2019.

“You end up with what I call the ‘kitchen drawer’ of HR software,” said Josh Bersin, a global HR analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Co., a consultancy. “You open the kitchen drawer, and you look in there, and you go, ‘What’s all this stuff doing in here? Where did we get it all?’”

How did we get here? For one thing, the HR-software market is a lucrative one; IBISWorld estimates it’s worth $20 billion in the US. It has some big names — Workday, Oracle, ADP — but also a plethora of smaller businesses and platforms, all promising to make managing a workforce better. For companies, managing workers via software instead of human beings is an appealing prospect. Technology and automation have decoupled the size of the company from the number of people required to manage everyone: Instead of having one HR person for every 100 employees, you can, in theory, have one HR person for however big a company gets because of digital systems to handle the scale. The technology is ideally meant to make it so one HR professional can manage administration, compliance, and requests for many more workers than in the on-paper, in-person past.

“HR teams have become more and more lean,” said Ashley Herd, the founder of Manager Method, a training platform for managers. “Frequently I talk to companies and they’ll have 200, 500 employees, and there’s really one or two dedicated HR people, so it’s like an octopus.” Herd added, “Even with all the technology in the world, an HR person’s inbox is crazy.”

If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

With fewer dedicated HR workers, many employees are left to fend for themselves. The problem is that each company has its own systems, and businesses aren’t investing in training employees on those systems. They’ve also decimated the ranks of middle managers who might be able to help. People’s tenures at work are shrinking, too, meaning that by the time they figure all the systems out, they’re on to the next job. This all means that it takes employees longer to get up-to-speed at new gigs and start firing on all cylinders, productivity-wise, because they’re wasting all this time figuring out how to do their jobs instead of just doing them.

“The front office now, in addition to doing its day job, has a proliferation of disparate solutions and disparate combinations of solutions at each company to familiarize with and learn how to use,” said Zachary Chertok, a research manager for employee experience at IDC, a market-intelligence firm.

Whatever the software, the experience for employees is often not great. It feels like a lot of this stuff is designed for the back office without the front office in mind or by people who just don’t really know what a good user experience would be. Management wants to know how many vacation days you took, and it doesn’t care if you had fun putting them into the app, so the app designers tend to deprioritize UX for the frontline employees. Even the big, sprawling tools like UKG and ADP can’t do everything — Harsh Kundulli, a senior director analyst in the HR practice at Gartner, a consultancy, told me that even companies that have invested in big human-capital-management systems still wind up having to use other HR software to fill in the gaps.

The issue isn’t just the people making the programs — it’s the companies buying them. Businesses often put various programs and apps in place without enough forethought. They worry about employee burnout, and instead of addressing what’s going on with their workers, they toss them a mental-health app that no one will ever actually use. Different leaders come in with different ideas about which programs they do and don’t like, and software providers have an incentive to constantly sell businesses new and different features. If your price is going up by 10% every year, you have to have an explanation.

“There are too many technology solutions out there, all claiming to have all kinds of overlapping capabilities,” Kundulli said. “Many times, HR leaders do not have the insight into the market to be able to orchestrate or to combine the right types of technologies, so they often end up buying many technologies that have overlapping capabilities with redundancies.”

Leaders can get excited about niche systems, too, using the big software for, say, payroll and the smaller, specialized programs for employee training or the initial phases of recruiting. This swinging back and forth makes the whole thing even messier.

“There’s this kind of ongoing cycle in software of bundling and then unbundling,” said Tomer London, the cofounder of Gusto, a payroll and HR platform for small and midsize businesses. His company is in the business of trying to bundle features into something that is, as London put it to me, as “intuitive, easy to use, delightful” as Instagram, which does sound nice. And hey, maybe they’ll get it figured out.

If the HR-software problem were easily solvable, it would probably already be solved. The experts I spoke with about fixes ranged from modestly optimistic to deeply pessimistic about the future of people management by robot. Companies aren’t bringing sprawling HR departments back — they’re too inefficient and expensive. It’s not clear we want to go back to the kind of bad old days of the HR lady filling out your paperwork next to your desk anyway.

“When money’s tight and they want to cut costs to demonstrate that they’re being responsible to their shareholders, they will put in software,” Carrie Bulger, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Quinnipiac University.

Some platforms put a layer over the top of various tools that puts them all in one place so that employees have one portal and don’t realize how many different things they’re dealing with. It’s a sort of artificial Russian nesting doll situation. ServiceNow does that, and some companies have big-enough IT operations that they can create these products on their own, Bersin said — meaning their employees don’t have to touch the shit software they’re actually using.

AI’s not going to fix all of this.

As with so many industries, artificial intelligence is also rearing its head. The hope in HR tech is that AI will be a game changer — that it will lead to a data-analysis revolution and create a fleet of digital assistants that can take care of annoying HR tasks so you don’t have to. Some people I talked with envisioned AI-powered chatbots that can tell workers how to accomplish tasks — basically, you type in “Where do I see my pay stub?” or “How do I submit my expense report?” or maybe put in your vacation request and get it sent straight to your manager.

“Each tool will have its own version of a digital assistant,” Chertok said. “In the near term, you’re still going to have to know which system do I go to for what? But the how is not going to be as much of a challenge because the assistant’s going to be there to help you through it.”

That seems fine and good I suppose, but also, dealing with 10 little chatbots across 10 different tools is not wildly better than where we are. There’s a race to see if someone can create a digital assistant to rule them all — Oracle or ADP or Microsoft’s Copilot — but for now, there’s no clear winner.

Not everyone is so gung ho about AI’s potential. AI needs to have a somewhat clean data source where everything is linked and mapped out and connected, which is not a thing a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, have. Who among us has tried to check some HR policy and been confronted with two dozen versions, the most up-to-date one impossible to tell? The AI might not be able to figure that out either.

“AI’s not going to fix all of this until we sit down and go through the process of mapping and connecting the things we need to understand about our employees and what’s going to do to our business,” said Stacey Harris, chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. “There’s so many layers of things that AI has to understand to then be able to predict what that person may or may not do. And each company has its own individual dataset.”

Kundulli, from Gartner, said that the AI chatter in HR is at the peak of inflated expectations and that a lot of companies that have bought into the virtual assistants are experiencing buyer’s remorse.

“These chatbots often devolved to being FAQs on HR policies,” he said. “The results are not the kind of earth-shattering productivity gains that’s often sold to HR leaders.”

There is one uncomfortable truth here, which is that one way to cut down on the random apps and constant switching would be to have one or two killer solutions that everyone uses, like Microsoft Windows back in the day or Google for search. I’m not promoting a monopoly here, but also, you kind of get why people don’t always hate them — they eliminate the hassles competition can create for consumers and can achieve levels of scale and efficiency that deliver people things they really like (see: Amazon in e-commerce). If every time you switched jobs you had the same HR system that you know how to use and that worked really well and remembered you, it would be kind of nice.

But it’s not certain a monopoly would even work. Bersin pointed out that PeopleSoft, the IBM-backed HR-management system released in the late 1980s, was supposed to be the be-all and end-all, until it wasn’t.

“Everybody loved it. It was really successful. But what they did is as they grew and they started to become very successful, they started to build more and more and more tools on top of it until it also became impossible to use,” he said. “It’s actually really hard to be a monopoly because the use cases are so varied by industry.”

Bersin is in the camp that thinks a bit of disaster is inevitable. “It’s going to be a competitive, dynamic, messy market forever, unfortunately,” he said.

There are ways to make things better on the margins, but none is a panacea — or within employees’ control. Companies can be more strategic about the tech that would be most useful, meaning they make a plan for what they’re trying to accomplish. There are some investments that businesses could make to fix things, too — spending that extra 20% to customize the system or putting together readable training materials that actually explain how things work. Of course, that doesn’t mean people are going to look at those materials or try to figure things out on their own. Candidly, I’ve had jobs where I’ve just given up on certain administrative tasks entirely because I couldn’t figure out how to do them and got tired of trying.

And so here we are, doomed to sit in front of our computers wondering whether the “kudos” we were trying to give our coworker, maybe somewhat as a joke, on whatever stupid app that just got rolled out is worth it, as we’re 20 minutes into the endeavor with no end in sight. Or maybe someday there will be some killer app that will do it all, or we’ll get some AI-powered chatbot to talk to HR about our problems that will make us feel slightly less nuts.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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