The Business Intelligence Dashboard
As a small business owner you would certainly know the importance of collecting and analyzing data pertaining to your business and transactions. Business Intelligence dashboards allow not only experts but you also to access information generated by analysis of data through a convenient display. Anyone in the company can have access to business performance metrics which assist them to channelize their behavior and efforts to achieve better results.
Before we proceed to learn more about the benefits of business intelligence dashboards, let us first know what essentially is a business intelligence dashboard?
A BI dashboard is a visual aid that simplifies and conveys complex information in a decipherable manner to its users. Small businesses can make use of graphs, search charts and other rich options which can be customized to a certain scenario to allow the user get a perfect preview of the sales and other variables in the business. In a nutshell, a BI dashboard reveals to a business what is driving its success or failure and where does the business stand.
Having understood what a BI dashboard is, let us delve deeper to understand its importance for a small business:
Deeper transparency
A BI Dashboard is an ace tool for a business to see what forces are driving it at any given point of time. The owner can pinpoint what is working and what is not without having to wait for the quarterly or monthly report. How well has a particular campaign worked, what has led to its failure or success, what has been the click rate on a particular banner, how many of those who clicked converted etc.
Time is money
In half the time as what will be taken by a staff person to create a report, refine it and present it to you, a Business Information Dashboard can give you the same information and also allow you to change it dynamically to suit the situation. A BI dashboard can be programmed to update automatically and provide the past reports too as reports keep building up.
Better results
When you dive deeper into the dashboard, you as a business owner can address the key performance indicators that will be most instrumental in improving your business operations. This will obviate the possibility of you chasing the wrong ones which may completely take you off the track. Dashboards indicate an improvement and downfall in business activities through a visual cue giving you an idea of the factors you should focus on.
Decreased stress
Dashboards can send you daily updates based on what you program it to generate. Such reports can be further programmed to produce certain designated KPIs only rather than giving you all inputs at once. Business Intelligence dashboard can make available profit, sales and service results over time as well as comparisons that give valuable business intelligence resulting in easy management of business assets.
Upping productivity
With a business intelligence dashboard, you can know certain KPIs such as speed of answering phone calls, return rate etc. which can exponentially enhance the productivity of your business.
Having read the benefits of a BI dashboard, it is certain that you are convinced of it being a fair dinkum tool for a small business. It is wise to make use of a business information dashboard to enhance your business productivity and take its reins in your hands, lest your business may chuck a wobbly and spiral out of your control towards irreversible damage
By Anthony Marion
Anthony is the business development manager at LogicalTech SysTalk, the largest dedicated BizTalk consultancy and provider of Enterprise Architecture solutions based in Melbourne, Australia.
