Business Intelligence Dashboard: All You Need to Know

The adage "knowledge is power" is frequently used. Although this remark cannot be applied universally and is a cliche, it does emphasize an essential truth about today's digital world: customer values are constantly changing. 

Communication strategies are evolving, and in today's technologically advanced world, success is strongly correlated with the volume rather than the quality of one's information — metrics about the business, the client, the rival, and the market. However, with Business intelligence dashboards, knowledge is dispersed throughout the organization, enabling users to produce interactive reports, utilize data visualization, and disseminate the knowledge with internal and external stakeholders. The IT departments no longer have exclusive access to information. The finest business intelligence dashboards make it simple to mix data from many sources, study this data, and evaluate it right there on the dashboard. 

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What is a Business Intelligence Dashboard?

A business intelligence dashboard can be defined as an analysis tool that displays data from numerous sources on one screen. BI dashboards give businesses the tools to track essential performance indicators and streamline operations to meet their objectives. There are a lot of other important business intelligence dashboard features too that help organizations.  

They are a tech-driven methodology used to analyze and helpfully present information. Charts and graphs are combined in the business intelligence dashboard design to give viewers a comprehensive view of the scenario they are studying. By displaying the metrics pertinent to its role, industry, or platform, BI dashboard tools adapt to the demands of the individuals designing them rather than having a fixed, predetermined nature.  

Who needs a BI reporting dashboard anyways? A dashboard is useful for almost all businesses. Multiple could be useful for larger organizations to create attainable aims and goals for each department. 

One can help project managers monitor work, spot issues, and maintain projects on schedule and within budget by keeping track of activities, deadlines, costs, and other metrics. Project managers can monitor their projects' status with a project dashboard, which offers real-time metrics. 

1. Examples of Business Intelligence Dashboard

Source

This image shows a brilliant Business intelligence Dashboard example. The resources and expenses have been shown by a circular color-coded graph in the bottom right corner. The activity is represented in a Bar graph, line graph, and pi graph. All these help the employees, executives, and the head to grasp the information at a glance and identify weak points in the business. It saves a lot of time and hassle of going through pages of data and contemplating them one by one to reach the same conclusion. 

Financial KPI dashboards, digital marketing dashboards, recruitment dashboards, web analytics dashboards, sales activity dashboards, executive marketing dashboards, pricing and supply dashboards, performance dashboards for email marketing campaigns, social media command center dashboards, and customer retention dashboards are a few common professional power BI dashboard examples. The options are essentially limitless! 

Business managers, corporations, and sales and marketing departments frequently employ sales and marketing open-source BI dashboards. These dashboards can have a wide range of capabilities. Still, their major attributes include the following: 

• A customized user interface. 
• A certain amount of interactivity. 
• The ability to pull data in real time from many sources. 

They simplify data processing for our brains and give readers a quick overview of past, present, and future performance by helping the user to visualize otherwise complex and weighty raw data. 

2. Business Intelligence Dashboard vs. Business Reports

Information and dashboards are essential for business intelligence, and dashboards can make complex reports easier to grasp for users. For stakeholders that require glances at performance, dashboards are perfect. Reports are for stakeholders who want to slice and dice data to find insights and need additional information.

Capability	BI Dashboards	Business Reports
Number of pages	One	One or more
Data Sources	Per dashboard, one or more reports and one or more datasets	A single dataset per report
Available on Power BI Desktop	No	Yes
Natural language queries	Available	Not available
Subscribe	Cannot subscribe to a dashboard	Can subscribe to a report
Filtering	Cannot filter	Many different ways to filter
Set alters	Can create alters to email on the meeting of creating the condition	No
Can see underly open-sourceable fields	No, can export data but cannot see tables and fields in the dashboard itself	Yes, can see dataset tables, fields, and values
Can create a visualization	limited to using "Add title" to add widgets to the dashboard	May add unique visuals, generate a variety of visuals, alter visuals, and do much more with editing permissions
Customization	Move and organize the visualizations (tiles), resize them, add links, rename them, delete them, and display them in full-screen mode.	In Reading view, you may post, embed, filter, export, and download as .pbix, look for related information, make QR codes, run Excel analysis, and more. You can perform everything mentioned before in the editing view and much more.

Business Intelligence Dashboard: Components and Features

BI dashboards are a technology-driven method of data analysis and visualization in an approachable manner. Best power BI dashboard designs include graphs and charts that give readers a complete picture of a firm's performance. BI dashboards provide business users with a consolidated view of pertinent and connected KPIs and trends for strategic planning and informed decision-making. Content creators can obtain quick overviews by combining charts, graphs, and reports on a single screen utilizing interactive components like filters and actions.

There are numerous capabilities available in business intelligence sales dashboard tools that may be utilized to automate tasks, enhance usability, and add visual appeal. Let's examine some of the main elements and functionality of contemporary BI Dashboards.

1. Interactive and customizable interface

The customizable interface enables users to create dashboards tailored to their needs. BI Reports allow viewers to access the data that underlies charts and visualizations for additional analysis, making them more interactive than static Excel reports. 

2. Common dashboard templates

Standard power bi dashboard templates already speed up the design process and enable users to import historical and current data. 

3. Connections to Data Sources

To combine data from many sources for analysis, BI Dashboards can link to Data Warehouses, Data Marts, Data Lakes, Operating Systems, etc. 

4. Data Visualizations

Users can depict different performance statistics using a variety of Data Visualizations, from simple Line and Bar charts to more complex images like Heat Maps and Scatter Plots. 

5. Drill-down Capabilities

These capabilities enable users to look closely at the underlying data by clicking on Data Visualization. This grants consumers access to more visualizations or data tables, typically organized hierarchically to allow users to drill down to different levels. 

Benefits of Business Intelligence Dashboard

Software is only one component of business intelligence. Data utilization in routine business operations is a comprehensive endeavor. The five advantages of BI are translated into practical successes that demonstrate BI in action. 

1. Faster analysis, intuitive dashboards

BI solutions are designed to do intense data processing on the cloud or your company's servers. After being gathered from numerous sources and stored in a data warehouse, the data is examined by BI tools utilizing user queries, drag-and-drop reports, and dashboards. Due to business intelligence, Lenovo increased reporting efficiency across multiple departments by 95%. Their HR department combined multiple monthly reports into a single snapshot dashboard. PepsiCo also used the BI's capacity to cut down analysis time by up to 90%. The benefit of business intelligence dashboards is that they make data analysis easier and simpler, allowing non-technical individuals to describe the data without needing to learn code. 

2. Increased organizational efficiency

BI provides executives with the resources they need to access data, gain a clear view of their business, and assess their performance concerning the organization. Taking a broad view of the company can help the leaders to spot possibilities. Pfizer has developed models to enhance patient diagnosis and expedite clinical trial processes. It also uses BI systems to promote departmental collaboration.  

3. Data-driven business decisions

Accurate data and timely reporting capabilities enable better business decisions. MillerCoors' sales force had access to real-time data and sales projections before meetings with prospective clients thanks to dedicated mobile dashboards. Sales may now confidently answer clients' or prospects' expectations because they know the most recent information. Leaders no longer need to wait days or even weeks for reports and deal with the potential for outdated information. 

4. Improved customer experience

Customer pleasure and experience can be directly impacted by business intelligence. Verizon produced over 1,500 staff dashboards after implementing BI tools across several divisions. These dashboards gathered operational data and text information from customer assistance chat sessions. Verizon discovered areas to enhance customer service and cut the number of support calls by 43% using this data. 

5. Improved employee satisfaction

Analysts and IT departments can react swiftly to business users' demands thanks to BI systems. Departments that previously couldn't access their data without contacting analysts or IT can now start data analysis with little to no training. By providing data solutions to departments that need them and to individuals with an insatiable curiosity for data, BI is made scalable. When Brown-Forman added 1,000 users to its BI platform globally, it found that it complemented its existing data architecture. Using business intelligence dashboard software, non-technical users should have a seamless and simple viewing experience.

How to Create a Business Intelligence Dashboard?

There are different types of dashboards in business intelligence. Here, we go through five essential best practices to create a business intelligence dashboard of the highest caliber.

Step 1: Integrate your data

You must first gather raw data and clean it up so it is analytics-ready before you can build any dashboards. Data from diverse sources must be mixed. Data replication, ingestion, and transformation must be carried out to merge different data types into standardized formats stored in a data lake or data warehouse. 

Step 2: Define your goals

The business aim you're attempting to assess, measure, and optimize must be defined explicitly. What step of your marketing funnel needs the most attention, or are you looking to identify new geographic areas to enter? 

Step 3: Keep visuals clean and simple

You may use your data to tell an engaging tale by maintaining a clear and straightforward visualization style. Select the graphs, charts, and maps that best describe your narrative by first taking the time to discover important KPIs and relationships. 

Step 4: Allow exploration and collaboration

Self-service Anyone in your organization may explore the dashboards and generate their insights thanks to BI. Instead of restricting users to linear searches, the most excellent solutions provide an associative engine allowing users to explore any links within the data freely. 

Step 5: Leverage AI

Augmented analytics, which combines AI and machine learning to support human intuition by providing insights and analyses and enabling search and natural language interaction, is included in modern BI dashboards.

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Business Intelligence Dashboard Best Practices

1. Make communication, not good looks, your number one priority

You want to make it possible to make decisions more quickly and accurately using data and facts. 

It doesn't matter how attractive your dashboards are. Making an open source BI dashboard physically appealing makes it more appealing to the eye and might even boost the chance of initial acceptance. Still, it does not imply that it is carrying out its intended function. Your dashboard must convey the necessary information most quickly and transparently feasible. But being attractive is not the goal. 

2. Modern dashboards must be Web-based

You risk breaking data governance rules if you deliver business intelligence dashboards through a channel other than the web. It is also limiting. How else will you guarantee that the data you're receiving is consolidated, controlled, and trustworthy if your dashboards aren't Web-based? 

You can access real-time information using Web-based BI, enabling you to seize an opportunity or head off a problem. You can also share findings, start immediate conversations with other decision-makers, and spur quick action via web-based dashboards. You receive primary data and real-time data-related collaboration. 

3. Put the most important information above the fold

The most significant reports and information should be placed above the fold—the area of your screen that can be seen without scrolling—just as competent journalists place the essential news in the first lines of their articles. This enables quicker data analysis and comprehension. 

Make sure the most crucial reports are at the top if you can't fit everything above the fold, and don't make your users scroll very far to get to the end. Instead of a lengthy description of every data from every source that might be related to the topic, think of your dashboard as a quick glimpse to answer a question.  

4. Start with the big picture and drill into detail

Display data in a succession of a high-level summary report giving an immediate picture of what's going on in an organizational setting. 

Your dashboard needs to provide an overview that addresses a particular requirement or question, as was described in the first point. Users can drill down into more excellent information utilizing drill down, drill through, and drill anywhere to understand why something occurred, what is causing change, and where improvements can be made. 

5. Ensure natural alignment and logical order of charts

Information structure is the foundation for quick and thorough comprehension, and reliable data is the foundation of good knowledge. 

Charts are arranged in the dashboard to promote the quickest, most straightforward, and most logical information consumption. It is poor design, for instance, to put a sequence of five reports on a dashboard such that the user cannot wholly comprehend the first report's significance until they have read the fourth. This slows down information understanding.

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Conclusion

Making wise decisions ultimately results in more opportunity, achievement, and technical improvement. Every user in the firm may now visualize data and produce interactive reports thanks to business intelligence dashboards. Business executives and managers may make educated decisions with the help of the power BI dashboard documentation template, which provides analytical information.  

There is a massive demand for a high number of business intelligence dashboard benefits. With knowledgeHut Business Intelligence certifications and engaging, interactive classes, you can acquire the necessary experience and information! One of the top online learning institutions in India, KnowledgeHut has assisted several students in realizing their goals, including passing some of the most challenging exams, gaining certifications, and obtaining great employment. Join us now to secure your professional goals!