Migrating from Reports to Dashboards
Upgrading your Business Intelligence
Historically, business intelligence (BI) has provided largely static views of data. Whether provided as tabular reports or charts, organizations often could not move easily move beyond these static views to see more detailed, or different information. That started to change with the introduction of drill-down functionality that allowed users to access detailed data from summaries. Dashboards, providing an intuitive and visual perspective of many key performance indicators (KPIs), enhanced BI further. However, how do organizations with many legacy static reports easily migrate to the more visual and interactive method of accessing management information that dashboards can provide? This Analyst Insight examines why organizations should consider making that transition to dashboards and how to get started.
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In Aberdeen’s April 2011 research into agile BI, self-service BI was the most popular strategy to increase the ability of the organization to respond to changing business needs. Self-service BI requires business users to actively explore and manipulate data themselves. The ability to “drill-down” from a high level of summarized information in a dashboard to access more detailed information is an important characteristic of any advanced business solution.
Drill-down capabilities can help cut the “time-to-information” and the “time-to-decision” for executives and managers. Both of these metrics can be improved because dashboards can enable managers to have faster access to timely, relevant and accurate information. Without drill-down capabilities, managers would most likely use traditional methods to get the information they needed – pick up the phone or call a meeting of their direct reports.
How Demand Metric Can Help
If you are currently in the process of evaluating BI vendors but need to start capturing data immediately, check out the following templates:
Key Marketing Metrics Dashboard
Sales and Marketing Performance Dashboard
Product Development Metrics Dashboard
Social Media Metrics Dashboard
Dashboard Readiness Assessment
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