“BI dashboards are an important tool for bringing businesses closer to their customers. With highly accurate, real-time insights into purchasing behaviors, consumer preferences and business reputation, enterprises can craft an exceptional customer experience,” says Alexander Igelsböck, CEO and Co-Founder, of Adverity in an exclusive interview with EnterpriseTalk.
ET Bureau: How can business intelligence dashboards play a significant role in enterprise analytics?
Alexander Igelsböck: The role business intelligence (BI) dashboards play in enterprise analytics depends greatly on the data maturity of the companies using them. For organizations at the start of the data journey that are relying on spreadsheets and siloed data, BI dashboards allow teams to build visualizations of relevant data points, which in turn assists faster, clearer reporting capabilities.
Meanwhile, for businesses more familiar with data handling, BI dashboards can transform an enterprise by enabling it to be proactive rather than reactive. When combined with predictive analytics, for instance, BI dashboards reveal hidden anomalies, anticipate upcoming trends, and inform future strategies. Whether forecasting business performance and the factors that influence it, or setting benchmarks against competitors, BI dashboards give business leaders a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced markets.
Also Read: Enterprises Face Storage Management Challenges Amid Data Growth
ET Bureau: Has there been any impact of the pandemic on this tool adoption and usage?
Alexander Igelsböck: The pandemic has caused huge shifts in business priorities. From suddenly needing to upgrade digital offerings to rapidly adjusting supply chains, companies found their initial 2020 roadmaps disrupted almost overnight. As enterprises seek to adapt to a constantly changing landscape, the demand for BI has spiked. The majority of businesses plan to allocate more budget to BI and data analytics in 2021, even in the industry sectors most impacted by the pandemic.
When utilized effectively, dashboards are an adaptable tool that can help businesses respond to shifting situations and achieve their continually evolving objectives. By making data and insights more accessible and intuitive for decision makers, BI dashboards provide better oversight of business outcomes and current trends. With agility now a critical part of organizations’ survival, insights empower business leaders to act quickly on industry or market developments. As businesses emerge from a time of exceptional change, the ones who leverage dashboards and analytical tools successfully will be the market leaders.
ET Bureau: Do you think the current enterprise environment has adequate knowledge and skillsets to make the most of analytical platforms and leverage data effectively?
Alexander Igelsböck: Once again, the answer lies in the enterprise’s data maturity level. Data maturity itself is an ongoing process and the position of individual organizations on the data journey varies greatly. Each business is on its own path with its own set of challenges – for example, almost a third of companies are impacted by poor data quality, while over a quarter state the results of their data analysis aren’t actionable. The most important step for businesses to overcome these challenges is to recognize the assets they already have and identify what additional skills will benefit their teams. In doing so, companies can bridge key knowledge gaps with specific training and empower teams to realize data’s full potential.
A common misconception when trying to leverage data and analytics effectively is that it requires considerable investment in costly technologies. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Part of data maturity is being selective about the analytics tools needed and, now more than ever, businesses must prioritize solutions that offer flexibility. Companies that take a more considered approach to analytics, investing in knowledge and skills not just the latest tools, will build an infrastructure that supports valuable, relevant, insight-driven decision making.
ET Bureau: What are some of the advantages of creating a dashboard with a Business Intelligence platform, compared to other reporting software?
Alexander Igelsböck: Dashboards fuelled by BI provide enterprises with the ability to monitor business performance and metrics in real time. By harmonizing and enriching data from hundreds of sources, dashboards act as a centralized tool that powers both an instant, comprehensive overview of outcomes and the capability to drill down into information. Based on this unified data, BI dashboards efficiently and accurately communicate current trends, forecasts and KPIs in an easily understood format, minimizing business leaders’ dependency on input from analysts. By enabling smarter, faster decision-making, dashboards built from unified data close the gap between generating insights and generating value from them.
ET Bureau: What kind of a role does a BI dashboard play in improving customer experience?
Alexander Igelsböck: BI dashboards are an important tool for bringing businesses closer to their customers. With highly accurate, real-time insights into purchasing behaviors, consumer preferences and business reputation, enterprises can craft an exceptional customer experience. In a digital-first landscape, consumer data can be gathered from an almost endless variety of sources. BI dashboards centralize all available data and make it accessible to the teams that matter, whether that’s customer service staff, digital marketers, or product development teams.
It’s important, however, that businesses prioritize data quality over data quantity. Only by concentrating efforts on what customers truly care about will they boost revenues and increase retention rates. When BI dashboards are developed with AI technologies, decision makers can tap granular insight into the preferences of each consumer, as well as leverage historical data to predict future needs. Dashboards also enable them to set business outcomes, measure deliverables and make ongoing adjustments to the customer experience.
ET Bureau: How can sales and marketing teams leverage Power BI dashboards to drive their business forward?
Alexander Igelsböck: BI dashboards can be tailored specifically to the needs of sales and marketing teams, delivering insight into the pressing questions they want answered. The customizable nature of dashboards allows teams to deliver on specific marketing objectives, such as brand awareness, conversion rates and return on investment.
Understanding campaign performance against these metrics enables marketers to optimize their efforts, ensuring they engage the right consumer at the best time with the most relevant message. BI dashboard solutions can offer a view of existing customers’ purchase history, buying patterns and preferred touchpoints empowering sales teams to target consumers with highly relevant and personalized opportunities. By streamlining paths to purchase, enterprises can boost profits and generate greater customer loyalty.
Also Read: Addressing 3 Major Roadblocks in DevOps Adoption
ET Bureau: What kind of an impact does inaccurate declaration of dashboard demise have on the industry?
Alexander Igelsböck: It is misleading to label any analytical tool as truly ‘extinct’ – it’s more likely that business needs have evolved in today’s dynamic climate. Although the value of dashboards has come under fire as analytical requirements shift, they continue to be essential. Interestingly, 85% of organizations plan to prioritize data and analytics in their decision-making processes going forward. In comparison, around two-thirds view personal experience and advice from others as key factors in their decision making. Looking ahead, business leaders will rely ever-more heavily on data analytics tools.
While dashboards have been critiqued for their alleged lack of big data analysis and inability to generate real-time insights, the technology exists to address these issues and enhance dashboard capabilities for current enterprise needs. As with many analytics tools, dashboards can evolve in response to changing priorities, regardless of a company’s data maturity level. From providing a comprehensive summary of key data points, to monitoring emerging trends, to generating future-looking analysis, dashboards have effective use cases for businesses at any stage of their data journey. Dashboards aren’t dead – it’s organizations that need to restructure their approach to data analytics.
Data-driven experienced CEO & Co-Founder of Adverity, Alexander Igelsböck has decades of experience in the tech industry. As an accomplished entrepreneur, Alexander saw the prospects in marketing data and its potential to drive business decision-making back in 2015. He co-founded intelligence platform Adverity, and as CEO, he works to enable data-driven businesses to improve their performance and transform siloed data into actionable insights.
Check Out The New Enterprisetalk Podcast. For more such updates follow us on Google News Enterprisetalk News.
Prangya Pandab is an Associate Editor with OnDot Media. She is a seasoned journalist with almost seven years of experience in the business news sector. Before joining ODM, she was a journalist with CNBC-TV18 for four years. She also had a brief stint with an infrastructure finance company working for their communications and branding vertical.
