Business Intelligence Dashboard: Definition & Examples | Qlik (2024)

The main benefit of BI dashboards is to help organizations answer questions and uncover insights that help them make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Transform raw data into business insights

Simple butcompelling data visualizationshelp you make your case for important initiatives and secure approval from decision makers.

Here we discuss five key best practices toward creating a world-class business intelligence dashboard.

1. Integrate your data. Long before you can create a data dashboard, you’ll need to collect raw data and then turn it into clean, analytics-ready information. This means bringing together data from a variety of sources and performing data replication, ingestion and transformation to combine different types of data into standardized formats stored in a data lake or data warehouse.

2. Define your goals. Make sure to clearly define the business objective you’re trying to analyze, measure and optimize. For example, are you trying to identify new geographical markets to enter or determine which stage of your marketing funnel needs the most attention.

3. Keep visuals clean and simple. Tell a clear, compelling story with your data by keeping your visualizations clean and simple. Spend time up-front identifying the KPIs and relationships that really matter and then choose the graphs, charts, and maps that most directly present your story.

4. Allow exploration and collaboration. Self-service BI allows anyone in your organization to dig into the dashboards and find insights of their own. The best tools offer an associative engine which allows users to freely explore all connections within the data rather than being limited to linear queries.

5. Leverage AI. Modern BI dashboards incorporate augmented analytics, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to bolster human intuition by suggesting insights and analyses and allowing search and natural language interaction.

More resources:

• Compare top dashboard software

• Dive deeper on business intelligence

• Explore our Dashboard Design Guide

Build and share your own custom dashboard

A modernbusiness intelligence toolmakes it simple for you to produce custom, interactive business intelligence dashboards that go way beyond tracking KPIs and visualizing data. Here are five key capabilities to keep in mind as you evaluate BI dashboard software:

• Easy Data Integration. A true BI dashboard tool is part of an end-to-end platform that includes both data integration and data analytics capabilities. This allows you to easily combine data sets from across your organization.

• Full interactivity. All stakeholders should be able to easily explore and analyze data right from the dashboard itself.

• Augmented analytics (AI). Today’s best dashboard software offers AI that suggests analyses for you to perform, and insights to gather from your data.

• Fully functional mobile. You and your teams need to be able to work with your dashboards from anywhere at any time, with full touchscreen and interactive functionality.

• Flexible cloud deployment. You should also be able to access and share your dashboards between on-premise and cloud analytics deployments. A flexible, multi-cloud architecture lets you scale your data while keeping governance and trust standards high.

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