I readily admit to not being a fan of reality TV shows -- except for the ones where folks on a house-hunting mission must decide which of several houses they’ve seen is really the one for them. One has an enormous yard for the kids, but the bedrooms are Lilliputian. Another has the highest of high-tech kitchens, but travel to and from work will take light years. And which one has the living room that will best accommodate a large (but seriously unattractive, says he) family heirloom? Yes, decision making on these shows is laced with some real drama.
It’s a rather stark contrast to the world of business, where there’s precious little need or room for drama in making gainful, profitable business decisions. Here, reality is all about putting real analytics and real business intelligence (BI) within easy reach of decision makers.
Dashboards: Tried and True BI Delivery
An SAP brief on the adoption of BI dashboards in business reminds us that dashboards have long been essential tools for monitoring business performance – helping executives make not just fast decisions, but decisions that count.
Now, realizing how great dashboards are for keeping people focused on improving KPIs, more companies want to use them at all organizational levels. And that makes perfect sense. Because the fact is, every employee’s day-to-day decisions impact the business.
Breaking Down the Barriers: It’s in the Design
So how does an organization get its salespeople and business users to jump on the BI dashboard bandwagon? By designing dashboards that are fully interactive, convenient, and that offer people personalized, role-specific content. And that’s all very doable – with the right tool.
First, you’ll need a tool that’s highly flexible and intuitive, with lots of prebuilt visualization components for building free-form dashboard layouts that can be quickly customized and personalized. But to really help dashboards get the broad use they deserve, you need a tool that also lets you:
- Embed your dashboards in Word docs and PowerPoints, PDFs, portals, as well as existing business applications
- Build interactive dashboards that support what-if analysis
- Create dashboards that can connect to any data source
- Publish your dashboards to iPads
- Scale dashboards to thousands of users
You’ll find more details in “AccelerateBusiness Intelligence with Mobile, Interactive Dashboards.”
If you’re considering BI dashboard for your business, you might also want to check out theanalytics services SAP has to help you plan, deploy, and optimize business analytics solutions.
