Unlocking Business Intelligence Dashboards for Data-Driven Success

Business Intelligence refers to those capabilities that enable organizations to make better decisions, take informed actions, and implement more efficient business processes. These capabilities involve data generation, visualization, and presentation, relevant to decision-making.

Business Intelligence Dashboards

These are information management and data visualization solutions used to analyze data. Business Intelligence Dashboards present data in understandable ways, are easy to customize (to suit your needs) and are easy to present to everyone.

Business Intelligence Dashboards visualize data in charts, maps, and graphs, which helps stakeholders understand, share, and collaborate on the information. They generally make it easy to combine data from different sources and analyze it within the dashboard.

Organisations use dashboards as part of their overall business intelligence strategy, to improve their decision-making. Dashboards eliminate manual data collection and presentation methods, making the entire process more efficient through automation.

Benefits of Business Intelligence Dashboards

Business Intelligence Dashboards help companies use data effectively to improve business performance and make better business decisions.

Some specific benefits of using the dashboards include:

1. Improved Decision-making
2. Make complex data easily understandable
3. Sharing data across business functional areas
4. Better visibility into financial and operational areas of the business
5. Identifying and reducing business inefficiencies,
6. Flexibility and Customizability
7. Identifying business opportunities and risks
8. Easily accessible information
9. Enables a company to keep track of their goals
10. Improve productivity and eliminate waste.

Some challenges that businesses face with Business Intelligence Dashboards include:

1. Ineffective Data Architecture
2. Poor Data Quality
3. Unclear Business Intelligence Strategy
4. Weak Content Management
5. High cost
6. Low adoption rates

These challenges, however, shouldn’t hinder the company from using the Business Intelligence Dashboards, as the benefits far outweigh the challenges.

Features of Business Intelligence Dashboards

Business Intelligence Dashboards usually include the following features to make them more insightful:

• Customizable interface: users can customize the dashboards to view the specific information required to make business decisions.
• Interactivity: users can interact with the dashboards to dig deeper into the data and play around with different visualizations.
• Ability to pull out near real-time data: Business Intelligence dashboards can connect to different data sources to provide users with near real-time information about critical business metrics.
• Easily accessible - even from a web browser: users do not need to download any applications to use the dashboards. They can easily be accessed from the web browsers.
• Standard templates: The dashboards come with pre-created templates to help users save time.
• Collaboration - through sharing functionality: the Dashboards enable users to share information with other users through the shared functionality.
• Data Visualization: Business Intelligence Dashboards can automatically generate several visual representations such as pie charts, bubble charts, KPIs, maps, etc.

Irrespective of the above features, any Business Intelligence Dashboard should be user-friendly, accessible, and understood by even the most non-technical person. This would make it an effective solution for businesses.

Examples of Business Intelligence Dashboards used in Businesses

Sales Dashboard

This dashboard gives the sales team insights into sales performance, customer behavior, pipeline management, etc. The dashboards also help the team track their progress, and identify patterns that could increase their revenue.

Marketing Dashboard

The dashboard can provide the marketing team with information on marketing campaigns, website analytics, customer engagement, etc. Using the dashboard, the team can identify success strategies that led to conversions and optimize their marketing strategy.

Human Resources Dashboard

Here, the dashboard can help monitor employee data, identify talent management opportunities, and optimize the company’s HR processes.

Helpdesk Dashboard

These dashboards help provide insight into ticket volumes, response time, and overall customer satisfaction.

Finance Dashboard

The dashboards help in assessing the overall financial health of the company. The finance team can analyze cash flow, track financial performance, identify cost optimization strategies, and monitor budgets effectively.

IT Dashboard

The dashboards can help the IT team improve data security and governance. It could also help them anticipate upcoming technology needs and identify under-used systems and applications.

Supply Chain Dashboard

The supply chain team can use the dashboards to streamline planning, identify risks in the supply chain process, and improve the overall supply chain process.

Best Practices for Business Intelligence Dashboards

The dashboard you use must meet the following industry best practices:

1. Designed and customized to meet the needs of the target audience
2. Data provided should include certain milestone dates like year-on-year comparisons, month-on-month comparisons, etc, to help stakeholders understand business trends.
3. The dashboard should display information to enable stakeholders to make strategic business decisions.
4. The dashboard should be as simple as possible but contain all the relevant information to aid decision-making.
5. Avoid widgets and reports that do not add value to the user.

The Distinction between Business Intelligence Dashboards and Business Intelligence Reports

Dashboards and Reports are important business intelligence tools that boost effective decision-making. However, there are slight differences between the two of them as follows:

• Dashboards provide a general overview of business performance at a glance, while Reports are more detailed and require in-depth reading.
• Cloud-based Dashboards can be updated in real-time, while Reports are more static, and do not offer real-time updates.
• Dashboards are visual and interactive, while Reports are not interactive.
• Dashboards can be customized to meet a user’s needs, while Reports are fixed and cannot be customized on a need basis.

Uses of Business Intelligence Dashboards

Business Intelligence Dashboards are used by Professionals for different purposes. Some of them include:

1. Tracking stock market fluctuations
2. Highlighting the demographic makeup of a school
3. Monitor the seasonal occupancy rate in hotels
4. Tracking the regional performance of departmental stores in different locations
5. Tracking total revenue for different products and across different locations
6. Quarterly sales forecasts

Creating a Business Intelligence Dashboard

Some key steps must be followed to create a Business Intelligence Dashboard. These include:

Step 1 - Integrate your data: Before creating the dashboard, data must be collected from different sources, cleaned up, and stored in a data warehouse ready for use.

Step 2 - Define your goals: Define what you want to achieve with the data you collected before you prepare your dashboard. This helps with data analysis and optimization.

Step 3 - Ensure the Visualization Dashboard is simple and clean: Choose the appropriate visualization that tells your story, whether graphs, maps, etc. The visualization Dashboard should be clear, concise, and easily understood by stakeholders.

Step 4 - Give room for collaboration and exploration: The Dashboard should enable users to explore it and find their insights, which would help in effective decision-making.

Business Intelligence Software Tools

There are several tools that businesses can employ for data visualization purposes, depending on their unique needs and available resources. Some of these tools include:

• Microsoft Power BI
• Tableau
• Google Looker
• Zoho
• Domo
• IBM Cognos Analytics

With organizations having access to a vast amount of data from multiple sources, such as sales, marketing, finance, and operations, managing and making sense of the data can be challenging without the right tools and techniques. Business Intelligence Dashboards allow users to make better-informed, data-driven decisions that lead to overall business success.