What is the true benefit of Dashboards or Business Intelligence software?

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on reddit
Share on email

In fact, the question should be “What should be the true benefit of Dashboards or Business Intelligence software? ”

excel dashboard exampleWhether you are using dashboard in excel, Dashboards in Microsoft Access, Quickbooks, business objects, Salesforce or big ERP like Oracle EBS or SAP, there are numerous tangible benefits of using InfoCaptor as your primary BI and dashboard app compared to other business intelligence software or reporting tools.

 

 

InfoCaptor Dashboard’s key selling point is “User Experience”. That is your number one aspect for ROI in Business Intelligence and Dashboards.

Now, well-designed dashboards are more interesting than most “old-fashioned” tabular reports [lot of the old sytle reporting software vendors have begun calling themselves dashboard bi tools] but we are not interested in just fancy looks. So let us see several notable benefits and also certain features or aspects within InfoCaptor that help you achieve them.

How can InfoCaptor help you with improved decision making and performance?

  • It provides the ability to perform improved analysis through visual presentation of performance measures
  • It provides the ability to easily identify negative trends
  • It provides the ability to make better informed decisions based on collected BI
  • It provides the ability to measure the organization’s efficiencies and inefficiencies
  • It provides the ability to align strategies and organizational goals

How can InfoCaptor help improve Employee efficiency ?

  • It increases your productivity
  • It saves time by eliminating the need for multiple reports
  • It reduces the need to create and maintain large numbers of static reports
  • It has low training requirements, and easy to learn (you can learn it in 45 mins)

“Five minutes into using InfoCaptor and you will know that you found a mission critical product. InfoCaptor helps you see your data from different angles like a CSI investigator on a crime scene. It helps visualize endless data, perform real time analysis and tell you where to focus your attention, what are the opportunities to invest your capital. The return on your InfoCaptor investment is guaranteed on your first project”

ImageIf you have used complex Business Intelligence tools like OBIEE you know the hair pulling user experience stories. These BI systems are out-dated and have lot of legacy UI and architecture. More and more organizations are staying away from such beasty applications and leaning towards Self service / Data Discovery applications. Both kind of BI applications have their place in the enterprise depending on the maturity of the business and how complex the needs are. [More.. Does your BI tool pass the “show me the money” test?]

InfoCaptor belongs to the “Self Service/Data discovery” category and even though there are several products in this area, InfoCaptor provides a complete end-to-end web based experience. There are no Desktop components needed [for e.g Tableau Desktop or Qlikview Desktop].

Having pure web based experience has the added benefit of building a data driven culture and I will tell you why in the following section. The main benefit of web based dashboard/data visualization is that there is no additional cost in maintaining the licenses on user’s machine. This eliminates extra licensing cost and also puts additional strain on your IT resources.

Now, coming back to our data driven culture point. How does a web based data visualization tool/dashboard app help in building a data-driven culture?
Imagine this, every employee in your organization is able to jump in to a system any time and is able to analyze whatever data they wish to. Any time they receive excel data as attachments, or when they find interesting data sets on the web, they can hook it up and visualize the dataset. This freedom allows them to think proactively about the datasets they receive and start asking the right questions. You see, it is not necessary to have every analysis published into a dashboard, there are cases for one time analysis/visualizations and their purpose is served once the insight is delivered.

DATA WITH NO ANALYSIS HAS NO VALUE

So an organization’s goal is to provide such instant accessibility and reduce the cost of producing this one-off insight(s) and this can be achieved easily using a web based front end that does not require any desktop install.

Just login, point to the data, click , analyze, Done!

If you are evaluating affordability of BI solutions [ Tableau Vs Qlikview Vs infocaptor vs other_bi_tool] in terms of pricing then you would be missing out on other important benefits listed above. Pricing and affordability is just one aspect of all business analysis tools.

There are other important considerations like

How easy it is to deploy the business intelligence system?

  • Can you install on cheap Linux VMs?
  • Does it require costly windows servers?
  • How easy it is to scale to 100 or 1000 users?
  • Does the licensing cost ramp up quickly when you need to add more capacity?
  • Does it need additional desktop licenses for each developer?

For any organization that is striving to leverage data, business intelligence needs to be embedded in all levels of the organization, allowing anyone that needs to make a decision-operational, tactical, or strategic decision-to make it based on the best data available. Business Intelligence is the combination of tools, processes and skills that help us turn the data deluge into better and faster decisions. Every employee should have this power as they are already making some form of decisions on a daily basis.

The Core Tools

Create dashboard for any Database

Data Visualizer and Dashboard Application
SALE
This is the best dashboard software for its price. One good thing we did was to hire their consulting services to build few dashboard prototypes and provide some quick dashboard training.
- Terry Seal, IL
We evaluated Xcelsius and Qlikview and the cost for organization to implement dashboards was quoted over 10,000 USD. For fraction of the above quoted price, we were able to buy the licenses for the web based dashboard software and get some free training. This is truly a dashboard software for small businesses like us.
IT Manager of a Trucking company, OH