According to research conducted by the Aberdeen Group, when business users can visualize information, they’re able to process it more effectively and make faster and better decisions. But what do you think of when someone says dashboards?
Probably a view with organized widgets, each showing a metric, chart or graph. Each one may even tie back to a specific report, allowing your employees to review data and monitor KPIs.
Many company dashboards were created with a traditional reporting framework in mind. Yet this approach presents significant challenges:
- These dashboards often display static information on ‘what happened’ and are not action-orientated
- These dashboards don’t enable fast decision making
- These dashboards don’t provide relevant business context up front
New paradigms in reporting and analytics are addressing these challenges. In this post, we explore the journey from dashboards to actionable insights and provide some tips to get you started.
Not all dashboards are created equally
Reporting dashboards have long been used in business intelligence to summarize information into instantly digestible analytics that provide at-a-glance visibility into your business performance. However, forward-thinking organizations are recognizing not only the need to translate data into visualized KPIs, but the importance of delivering insights that are more accessible, understandable, and relevant for business users at all levels.
In addition, users are demanding that analytical capabilities are delivered in context, with a better framework of how and why the insight is important as well as how it can be used to drive performance.
To start, it’s important to understand the three types of dashboards used today:
- Strategic – aggregates critical, overarching metrics, presenting a 10,000-foot view of a business
- Analytic – gathers and compares particular metrics across time and many variables, drilling down to actionable data per user or team
- Operational – monitors data in real time, alerting a user or team to any issues that need to be addressed
By leveraging advances in big data, machine learning, mobile technologies, and user interface design, you can help users approach decisions with greater accuracy, effectiveness, and timeliness.
Unlike traditional, static dashboards, insights-driven dashboards are role-based, intelligent, contextual, action-oriented, and integrated into the processes and applications that run your business.
The journey to insights requires a change in mindset and process
Making the transition from traditional dashboards to actionable insights requires a review of your data architecture, organizational change, automation and user engagement. And sometimes this new approach calls for fresh eyes – advanced analytics experts like Antuit can help you define, implement and manage your new insights-driven strategy.
Here are a few questions to ask when getting started:
Data architecture
- Do you have a strong data architecture that can support an agile business environment?
- Does your data architecture generate trustworthy and consistent data?
- How do you want to deliver the output to users? What is the platform you serve data through?
- Do you have a solid data governance system in place?
Organizational change
- Do you have a team to gather business requirements?
- Do you understand how users get work done and how insights can expedite the process?
- How will you operationalize insights across your enterprise?
Automation
- Are your data sources consistent in structure?
- Is there a defined frequency of data updates?
- Does the nature of your business cause frequent changes in the structure of how data needs to be reported?
Data visualization today has evolved far beyond the pie charts and bar graphs. The field today is vital in turning insight into action and can help find unseen patterns and connections in your data that give you a competitive advantage.
See how Antuit combines data science, domain knowledge and data visualization expertise with the latest reporting technologies to enable insights-driven organizations.
