Business analytics dashboard reporting and business intelligence benefits
Business analytics dashboard is necessary ingredient for success of your business. The main goal of a business dashboard is to present an efficient business insight into the performance of your organization. It shows the critical success factors and KPIs in an easy to understand way by using visual charts and indicators. In addition effective business dashboard report shows to the user the trends and the reasons why certain performance are at a certain level.
Business users can make smart decisions based on the latest facts by simply looking at their dashboard. In addition users can research and investigate additional business metrics in order to better understand the reasons behind their KPIs performances.
As your business grows the volume grows and operations are getting more complex and in many cases it is difficult to have a good organization wide performance management system. Dashboard reports can help companies develop an analysis and reporting system which simplifies the complexity by focusing on the key business drivers and metrics.
Not only your dashboard is an analysis and reporting tool but it is also an effective communication and presentation tool for management. Visual KPI reporting is easy, saves time and everyone in your company can understand the priorities – it is a visual representation of your strategy and implementation plan.
The best test for creating and developing dashboard is to ask yourself if your reports represent your strategy. The gap between the overall organizational strategic goals and targets on one hand and the actual KPIs and metrics on your dashboard should be minimized as much as possible.
Another important benefit of your business dashboard is the fact that it is a management alert system where you can identify risks, opportunities, threats, trends and other developments at a glance. Many problems and important issues in many organizations are not identified and recognized on time and as a consequence the opportunities are missed and problems become even bigger threat to performance.
While the media and the platform used for your dashboard is very important, the first step in creating a dashboard is to develop an effective representation of your strategy. Many mistakes are made (which costs a lot of company resources, time and money) because decision makers don’t take this step seriously and make decisions about developing their dashboard reports based on the applications and tools which are available and decisions are made based on the look of the dashboard instead of considering the functionality, cost, development time, maintenance and ongoing cost, licensing, any future updates, etc.
Once the first step is completed, organizations must use a total cost of ownership analysis in their decision making process in order to develop a good cost and benefit analysis and make a smart long-term decision.