Reaping the Benefits of Next Generation Dashboards

Reaping the Benefits of
Next Generation Dashboards
The need for timely and succinct business intelligence (BI) A Need to Overcome Inflexibility continues to grow as executives demand critical information to seize opportunities faster than competitors and to address The old approaches for collecting, assimilating, and potential problems in the making. delivering BI information have not kept pace with today's increasing demand for rapid decision-making and flexible But increasingly, it is not just C-level executives and upper information access requirements.management who need access to business intelligence. Business unit managers and rank-and-file personnel A majority of organizations leverage static reports and ad-increasingly must also have updated information to do their hoc queries as primary methods for delivering business jobs. intelligence information, according to a 2007 CIO Insight survey of 215 senior business managers. These methods And in every case, users of business intelligence solutions were found to be in use, respectively, by 81 percent and desire a flexible and intuitive method for assimilating 67 percent of the managers in companies with revenues information without manually gathering data. The delivery of $500 million or more. While a smaller percentage of mechanism must provide transparent connectivity organizations use dashboards and portals (62 percent and and security to users, while presenting an easy to use 48 percent, respectively), most implementations of these interface for navigating and consuming information. These tools lack the interactivity required for intuitive navigation requirements are driving the demand for a new generation and visualization of business data. of BI solutions. Additionally, as information requirements and user demands increase, traditional BI solutions present obstacles and limitations that slow an organization's ability to integrate Next generation dashboards: business processes and strategy. In turn, this can hamper intelligent decision making in organizations today. . align business process with live data to provide business intelligence at all levels of A major challenge for organizations is the gap that some an organization BI applications widen between IT and the business unit. . use intuitive and easy to digest visuals for While communication is difficult enough, some tools can also hinder what should be a collaborative process delivering information to busy executives between business users, stakeholders, and developers who . visualize and navigate timely and accurate implement BI solutions. The inflexibility of many BI tools can information lead to deployed solutions that still fall short of business users' expectations for addressing business problems. A careful implementation of technology that properly aligns to
 Sponsored bybusiness process or strategy is critical to the success, yet can Solution: next generation dashboardseasily be compromised based on technology choices. Faced with these challenges, organizations demand integrated and flexible business intelligence solutions that facilitate more timely and informed decisions. Next Traditional BI solutions face many generation dashboards will solve these challenges, by introducing a robust entry point into business intelligence at obstacles and limitations, and they might all levels within an organization.not be capable of evolving. The next generation of dashboards must:
An additional challenge of collecting and "mashing" data Be easy to build and customize: While traditional from multiple disparate systems can present obstacles, dashboard projects required great amounts of custom slowing a business users' ability to make critical business coding, the next generation of dashboards empower non-decisions. For example, past BI efforts typically included IT professionals to design and connect business data to a information from a centrally maintained enterprise database, dashboard interface. This approach bridges the gap between as well as data from enterprise resource management, sales IT and business intelligence users, allowing stakeholders force automation, and supply chain management systems. to become proactive in the design process. Dashboard As organizations outsource functions like marketing, product technology should be flexible, allowing an unlimited design, customer service, and others tasks to third parties, combination... [download for more]