Business intelligence (BI) plays a vital role in every modern organization’s decision-making processes. But what is BI? Business intelligence is a tech-driven method for analyzing data to be used in critical decision making, both for short-term and long-term operations. This article investigates the business intelligence visualization method and key elements of the BI dashboard.
What is a Business Intelligence Dashboard?
A business intelligence dashboard is an interactive data visualization and analysis tool used to track metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other relevant data to the business decision-making process.
When done well, BI dashboards present data in a way that is readily discernable and easily digested. The best ones allow you to customize the information you want to see and offer a variety of methods of sharing your analysis with relevant people.
Traditionally, reports were used to present information, and there is a common misconception of them being the same as BI dashboards. While reports require in-depth and cumbersome analysis, it is much easer to understand the BI dashboard with a brief overview.
Here are the key elements of a well-designed BI dashboard:
Data Visualization
BI dashboards use various data visualizations to display performance metrics and other critical information. These visualizations include a common bar and line charts or graphics like scatter plots and bubble charts.
BI dashboard will provide your team with at-a-glance visualization that will help track performance and decision making. However, if incorrect or unreliable data is fed into the data visualization, the dashboard will be useless as it will not help improve business performance.
The dashboard should be carefully designed to identify trends, either positive or negative, and predict the outcome.
Data Sources Connections
BI Dashboards should be connected to data sources like data warehouses through integration or external data feed and operational systems to ensure real-time and accurate data. Remember that a well-designed dashboard has the potential to promote and change your business trend. Choose the data that should be presented wisely to avoid confusion.Start by defining the type of necessary data, either qualitative, quantitative, or a combination of the two. Also, ask yourself, what are different ways of presenting this data.
Data Tables
Your BI dashboard may also use tabular data to provide relevant information at-a-glance. Color-coding can be used to highlight specific or critical information. It’s vital to avoid clutter for easy understanding of the data by the end-user.
Data Filters
A well-designed BI dashboard should offer different ways of exploring data to discover a wide range of insights. A useful feature that enables interactivity is a data-filter or click-to-filter option. Dashboard users can use charts and graphs dimensions as temporary filter values.Users can use data filters to customize geographical settings, date and time, and other parameters for a more accurate view of the information.
Drill down
The drill-down feature should not be overlooked if you want interactivity. This helps users get more information or further analyze detailed data. With drill down, you can add more levels to charts by simply clicking on the visualization. This feature enables you to fit another variable into the table or chart, and you can change the chart as per your parameters.
Text Boxes
BI dashboard text boxes are used to further explain the data being visualized, or provide extra information about the analytics results. Text boxes eliminate the risk of overlooking vital information, especially when monitoring the performance of business trends.
With these key elements of a BI dashboard you can keep everyone apprised on the latest data insights. Business users can share in-depth analytics dashboards in communal portals and app instantly. With multiple data insights in one place, thousands or even millions of users can stay in the loop and access the interactive visualizations they need to make informed decisions.
