Types And Benefits of BI Dashboards

In today’s data-driven business landscape making informed decisions is crucial for staying ahead of the competition. And this is where Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards come into play. The BI dashboard is a powerful tool that offers a comprehensive & visually appealing overview of key metrics, trends, and insights, empowering organizations to monitor performance, identify patterns, and make data-backed decisions.

Whether you're a business owner, a manager, or an analyst, understanding the ins and outs of BI dashboards is essential for unlocking the true potential of your data.

Dashboards are the key components of Business Intelligence (BI) platforms and are universally and popularly used to deliver information based on analytics.

What is a Business Intelligence dashboard?

A business intelligence dashboard is an analytics and data visualization tool that displays key performance metrics (KPIs) and many other important business metrics and data points for businesses. It is used to track, analyze and display data, giving insight into the overall working of the company, its departments and even specific processes.

Dashboards connect data sources, KPIs, metrics and various other services. They enable companies to extract relevant information from data sources to display the results in a user-friendly way. Just like a car dashboard, a data dashboard organizes and displays vital information that can help understand the data briefly. The visual information offered by dashboards go beyond graphs and colors. Dashboards enable visualization of the data story to help communicate the complex data relationships that make it easier for businesses to base their decisions on. The interactive dashboards offer more information than the usual static reports and help engage users in accessing and analyzing data that underlies charts and graphics. Widgets, icons, and images can be added to dashboards to automate user functions, improve visibility, visual appeal and more.

Types of Dashboards:-

There are four types of dashboards, each catering to a different set of requirements. All four dashboards generate a different level of summary, analytic capabilities & user interfaces.

• Strategic dashboards: A strategic dashboard is used to monitor long term organizational strategies using critical KPIs. Since these dashboards provide an enterprise wide impact, they are used in a wide range of business types while aligning a business goal. They are used to track performance metrics against business strategic goals and they give out summarized progress over time frames spanning months, quarters or years. Implementing a well designed dashboard can help in effectively reducing the time required to accomplish specific business KPIs and operational costs. The importance of these dashboards lies in analyzing processes using common quantitative and qualitative language.
• Operational dashboards: Operational dashboards are used by businesses to monitor and optimize performance of short term operations. These dashboards generate responses based on real time, updated and detailed queries. These dashboards are used to review KPIs on a daily basis and evaluate project performance.
• Analytical dashboards: Analytical dashboards use historical data to identify trends, compare variables, generate predictive analysis which can be implemented. These dashboards provide a comprehensive overview of data enabling organizations to efficiently generate visualizations for complex information. The Google Analytics dashboard is a typical example of an analytical dashboard. It helps identify trends and patterns about how visitors engage with websites over a period of time. It offers multiple filters and can drill down to generate visualizations about each traffic source, region, time and more.
• Contextual dashboards: These dashboards offer contextual analytics and combine actions with the data to trigger workflows and transactions. The data is displayed directly in the interface which helps when more context or insights are required in decision making. Contextual dashboards offer dynamic alerts, prompts and filters to guide users to more relevant data. This helps users to derive insights without having to switch applications.

Benefits of BI dashboards:-

• Improved decision-making - Informed decisions can be taken based on key information and metrics generated using BI dashboards. Using BI dashboards, decision-makers can easily analyze company accomplishments by comparing past and present performance data. The use of BI dashboards helps in creating strategic data points that enable companies to make the right decisions at the right time.
• Increased visibility - In today’s digital world, large volumes of data are streamed from different sources and it's easy to miss out on important information and decision-makers may not get the overall view. Using BI, dashboards can generate visualizations that can help in tracking, analyzing, and displaying KPIs, metrics, and other critical data points for easier understanding and interpretation of raw data.
• Boost productivity - Using big data, BI dashboards automate the reporting processes that result in a reduction in time, effort, and costs, subsequently increasing productivity. Predictive and prescriptive analysis becomes simpler with BI dashboards. Using historical data, predictive analytics can make predictions about future outcomes by combining statistical modeling, data mining and machine learning. This BI tool helps identify opportunities and risks in business. Analyzing data and using all possible permutations and combinations, prescriptive analysis takes into account all the relevant factors and determines the most optimal course of action.
• Customer behavior - Business gains insights using business intelligence dashboards. Customer buying behavior, their purchasing preferences and other insights help in creating better marketing initiatives that help enhance customer behavior. Retail businesses can use analytics dashboards to create data-driven customer usage maps that provide insights about their interaction with retail websites, the business itself, and ultimately the products.
• Flexibility - Dashboards can be ported to a variety of devices like smartphones, desktops, and other smart devices. This enables users to view, analyze and use the data from anywhere, at any time, helping increase business flexibility.

In conclusion, BI dashboards have a huge and identifiable impact on business. BI dashboard tools enable inventory control, help in identifying and removing operational bottlenecks and manage supply chains. Connecting with business intelligence development services, organizations can make use of big data and get real-time dashboards that offer intelligent and powerful reports and analytics. Businesses can identify trends, opportunities, and any issues by using such services. A BI development company can also help in organizing and structuring data in a way to create concise and actionable reports which can be used by all the stakeholders within the company.