4 Essential Characteristics of Modern BI Dashboards
Empowering business users with actionable insights in real-time uncovers new revenue channels. If the Data that is extracted from disparate data sources, upon getting processed, cleansed and analyzed are not presented as valuable insights for quick consumption, it may not be of any value in today’s dynamic business environment.
The trend is implementing Dashboard platforms that offer self-service capabilities throughout the data life cycle, advanced data visualization options and actioning on real-time insights in a truly omnichannel style. The rise in data discovery, access to big data, data preparation tools and automation capabilities have increased scope for smarter analytics. Rapid advancements in the field of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence is bound to disrupt this space even further.
To empower data-driven decision making in real-time, check if your Dashboard has the following characteristics.
1. No more fragmented data
Dashboards lively sync 24/7/365. Every business engages with customers, partners, ven-dors, employees and other stakeholders via various digital touch points. A plethora of un-structured and structured data is generated due to these multi-directional conversations. The ability to extract data from all these sources, cleansing them and making it ready to perform deeper analysis is possible only with an integrated data environment. Only with the integrated data, a business will be able to analyze customer sentiments, employee re-tention, campaign performance, Return on investments, value adding vendors, next best employees etc. in a holistic manner. Today, Dashboarding platforms come with advanced data connectors to integrate social, mobile, ad syndication platforms and even custom da-ta sources such as excel sheets, SQL databases etc.
2. Configurable advanced filters
The process of extracting valuable insights doesn’t end with stashing volumes of pro-cessed data in an integrated data environment. You should be able to slice and dice through the data with multiple dimensions and parameters. Smarter Dashboard platforms offer advanced capabilities to use filters, validation criteria, formatting and present gener-ated insights in a visually consumable manner. Filters make the job of skimming through volumes of structured data, compare present data with historical data, drill down to demo-graphic, regional segmented data so easy and saves enormous amount of time. There are platforms that allow importing of custom database queries to extract data and filter specific data sets from integrated data sources. Usage of filters in Dashboards unearths strategic questions and offers newer perspectives of the same data.
3. Secure Data Access and Administration
Modern analytics platforms go beyond relying on single sign-on authentication (SSO) se-curity solution. or multi-factor authentication techniques. Enable security tokens to estab-lish an extra layer of assurance along with multi-factor authentication.
Data integrity is an essential ingredient within analytics platforms that protects data from within the organization by unauthorized deletion or manipulation of valuable data. En-cryption is another favorable security feature to encrypt data while storing and retrieval.
Advanced mobile friendly security measures for protecting mission critical data such as Personal Identification numbers (PIN) and One time Passwords (OTP), security certifi-cates are highly recommended to protect data of competitive importance and regulatory compliance.
4. Omni-channel alerts and status updates
Business users are glued to their smartphone, tablet or web browsers to stay on top of factors that drive their business performance. Dashboards present a responsive view of actionable information across these devices. Smarter dashboards allow users to write custom business rules-based alerts for real-time decision making across critical business functionalities such as revenue management, customer growth, product availability, etc. Alerts trigger automated workflows, demand timely decision making across devices, browsers, platforms and initiates follow-up actions to mapped stakeholders in a globally distributed team.
If your dashboard has the above-discussed characteristics you are right on in enabling real-time decision making. If you think your dashboards could be made even more smart-er, then start enabling that new-age functionality with in-house expertise or by taking the help of a value-adding technology service provider.
