It's common knowledge today that business intelligence (BI) dashboards are powerful tools that can help you track and analyze your business performance, identify trends and patterns, and make better decisions based on data, not gut feeling. There several benefits to using a business intelligence dashboard, and it can have a big impact on your business.
In this blog, we answer the age old question question of what is a dashboard, and how a business intelligence dashboards can greatly help you improve your overall performance. We also discuss the impacts of using dashboards, and how you can get the most out of it.
What is a BI Dashboard, KPI, and Metric?
A business intelligence dashboard is a graphical representation of key performance indicators (KPIs) and business metrics, and a useful tool that helps managers and executives track and analyze their performance. A BI dashboard can help identify areas of improvement, track progress made on strategic goals, and identify trends in KPIs, with updates done in real-time.
Business intelligence dashboards allow you to see, at a glance, how your organization is performing overall, or across specific departments. They lead you toward where focus your efforts and make better decisions by understanding your business performance and always having access to it, enabling you to improve your operations and boost your bottom line.
Related: 4 Key Features of a Modern BI Dashboard
What is the Impact of Using BI Dashboards?
BI dashboards, combined with data visualization, help managers, end-users and decision-makers take data-led action and identify opportunities for growth. By understanding how customers interact with your business, you can improve customer service and drive revenue growth a lot better than just relying on intuition or gut feeling.
Here's some of the major ways how BI dashboards can impact your business and help:
1. Communicating Business Critical Information At-a-Glance
BI dashboards can help you quickly and easily access key data to make informed decisions. By seeing trends and patterns, you can make better decisions about where to allocate resources and what changes to make.
You can monitor business performance in real time and make adjustments as needed. This helps you stay ahead of the competition and stay in control of your business.
2. Timely, Easy Access to Information for Everyone
Not only data analysts and developers can benefit from dashboards. Anyone who needs to access critical information quickly and easily can benefit.
This includes marketing managers, finance personnel, and even your customers. By creating centralized dashboards, you can make it easier for everyone to access the information they need, providing actionable insights in a timely manner.
3. Data-Driven Decision Making for All, Fostering a Data Culture
A data-driven culture helps you identify opportunities and avoid potential pitfalls. Data points can help you make informed decisions about your business. By understanding what's happening in your data, you can make better strategic decisions and optimize your operations.
BI reports can help you identify where you need to focus your efforts and identify potential risks. This helps you stay ahead of the competition and optimize your business for growth.
4. Less Guesswork and Intuition, More Usage of Proven Forecasting Methods
By using predictive modeling and other forecasting methods, you can ensure that your business is prepared for what's coming. BI dashboards saves you time and money, as you're not forced to react to unforeseen circumstances when you have a at-a-glance summary of your most important reports and business metrics available in analytical dashboards.
A self service BI platform can help you automate your forecasting processes. This means you can focus on more important tasks, such as running your business. You can get insights into your data in a matter of minutes, rather than hours or days.
5. Real Time Analytics of Customer and End-User Behavior to Adjust On-the-Fly
An analytics platform can help you understand customer and end-user behavior in real time. This allows you to make adjustments to your marketing and sales strategies as needed. You can also track how your customers are using your products and services with BI dashboards. This helps you to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales.
6. Enhanced Visibility of Data Across the Entire Business
Data visualizations make it easy to see patterns and trends. Combined with properly designed dashboards, it can help you make better decisions and improve your operations significantly.
A BI platform can help you create dashboards that show data in a variety of ways. This way, you can see all the data that's important to your business. You can also get alerts in your dashboard when there's a change in your data.
Why is Business Intelligence & Data Analytics So Important?
Data analytics is the process of analyzing data to extract meaning and make decisions. In business, data analytics can help organizations understand their customers, identify trends, and make better decisions.
BI dashboards are powerful tools for managing and monitoring data. The types of data you can track will vary depending on your business, but a typical business intelligence dashboard will include measures of performance such as revenue, customer churn, and customer acquisition costs.
For both enterprise organizations and product teams, BI dashboards in combination with data visualization can help you answer the following questions:
What are our current performance metrics?
What are the trends over time?
What are our most important performance indicators?
What are our biggest opportunities for improvement?
Dashboards can also help you make informed decisions. For example, if you see that your revenue is declining, you can investigate the reasons and take steps to address them.
BI dashboard design and accompanying data visualization is important, in part, because it allows you to quickly and easily share your data (metrics and KPIs) with key stakeholders. By providing a visual overview of your data, you can help them make informed decisions, increase buy-in with your adopted BI tools and dashboards throughout the business, and improve their understanding of your performance.
Next Steps: Finding the Right Dashboard Solution
Yellowfin is packed with powerful features that make it easy to create and use business analytics dashboards, with powerful dashboard design tools that make it easy to compile your most important KPIs and metrics in a single interactive space, and create graphs and charts that illustrate your data in a clear and concise way.
Yellowfin's data discovery tools help your users find insights they may have missed before, an interactive dashboard gallery that lets you interact with best practice BI dashboard examples, and several out-of-the-box dashboard samples that you can further customize to your unique use cases and audience requirements.
It's a definitive solution for the ever-present question - what is a dashboard? But don't take our word for it - see it for yourself, in action.