Data permeates the whole business but the biggest challenge faced today is getting to the valuable insight that inspires the business to take meaningful action.

Presenting data in a stunning Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard with a slick user experience is all well and good, but if the data coming in isn’t accurate or complete, data visualisations are rendered meaningless. Similarly, on the other end of the value chain, even if a brand has brilliant data that fuels insightful visualisations for the whole business, they’re worth nothing if nobody logs in. Users need a vision and mission to buy into, fuelling the motivation to log in, to explore the data, draw conclusions, derive meaningful insight and tell powerful stories.

In this blog post we cover the key elements to level up your report and dashboard game to boost performance for your organisation, especially with your marketing.

The best Business Intelligence tools

At Hexdon, we’ve evaluated the best that QlikSense, PowerBI and Tableau have to offer. There’s a very fine line between them. Here is the Gartner Peer Insights for you to compare platforms. We would recommend your evaluation covers these core areas:

• Reporting Capabilities: Go beyond visualising data to create meaningful insights and actions.
• Data Consolidation: The ability to centralise data from silos into a data layer that creates value, especially team collaboration when combined
• Data Visualisations: Ensure data is interpretable and actionable insights can be derived. The leading BI platforms all showcase brilliant data visualisation capabilities, so the deciding factor is: which will stand out for your organisation?
• Knowledge management at scale: The ability to collate insights in a meaningful way for the enterprise to harness: qual, quant and everything in between.
• Ease of use: Ease of access too. Without training, how easy will it be for a user to utilise the business intelligence tools? This is when hearts and minds are won and lost.
• Automation: Data in, data processing, powering visualisations and alerts. This is where you can reach more people, deliver higher engagement and richer use of data and insight.
• Leveraging Data Science, AI and ML: A BI platform must be able to work with more advanced data platforms, delivering outputs, supporting new innovations and more.

Empower your organisation with the Business Intelligence tool that’s best for your organisation. This ensures the capabilities stand a great chance of being utilised to help your business users to lead with actionable insight and help the business to improve business results.

Create Clear Goals

The most impactful way to level up your Business Intelligence dashboards is to set clear goals from the start and ensure they’re endorsed by your key stakeholders on the c-suite. If they’re on board and endorsing this, everyone else will fall in line. And beyond the platform goals themselves, set goals for your dashboards too.

Goals, Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s) are typically represented in a BI dashboard. They’re a great way to track performance against last year, against benchmarks and against targets.

Remember setting clear goals has a process to follow. From draft through to publishing the final reports and ensuring buy in from the business. And don’t forget to annotate with notes. Data in visualisations without any context has no meaningful value.

Set clear goals so everyone’s aligned on the data and insight that inspires decision and improved business results.

Find Data Weaknesses

Your data visualisations are only as good as your data weaknesses. You’ll know where your weaknesses are because your users will tell you. They’ll share their questions, their doubts and more. If you can’t answer their queries, you have a data weakness to resolve.

Eliminating data weaknesses means you’re building trust. This trust ensures more people utilise the data, insight and take action to improve business results.

Business Engagement Is Critical To Success

A common misconception with business intelligence is assuming that when you build a great data and insight solution, the people will come. Don’t assume this, ever. You need to engage stakeholders across the business functions and at all levels of the organisation, from the c-suite and their leadership teams, through to the data citizens on the ground.

Setting out the vision and mission gets the business aligned to the programme and regular check ins on project progress is essential. Be sure to capture their requirements, their feedback and ensure you include a robust education programme for launch.

Get in touch

If you would like to discuss any of the themes we covered here, contact us using the links below.

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