Before digging into the details, it’s worth unpacking the purpose of BI dashboards and the three most common types.

Put simply, a dashboard’s goal is to make people smarter and make your business more money. This is accomplished by providing quantitative metrics that are easily digestible in visual form, along with the means to make better decisions and improve current capabilities. In practice, this means collecting, curating, and analyzing the best data for the intended purpose and using this data to inform a specific audience.

To help streamline this process and ensure the right people have access to the right data, BI dashboards are often divided into three subtypes: executive, operational, and analytic:

While using the wrong database for the audience doesn’t invalidate the results, it can create bottlenecks in the BI process and limit the efficacy of these tools.

So how do companies make the most of BI dashboards? Five questions can help.

Who are you developing this dashboard for? Is the intended audience C-suite executives, operational teams, or business intelligence analysts? The question aligns the type of dashboard you deploy with the audience using it.

For example, if your audience is business executives, the goal is to deliver a dashboard that provides simple and clear-cut visual takeaways. If you’re deploying a dashboard for engineering teams to monitor system health, more granular data reporting is the priority.

With your audience identified, it’s worth drilling down further to understand what they need to know—and how it can help your business.

Consider an operational dashboard. To help teams determine what’s going wrong and why, real-time data is essential. Strategic dashboards are focused on bigger-picture questions and answers that allow C-suites to make better decisions, while analytic dashboards look to pinpoint root causes. By understanding what your audience needs to know and when they need to know it, your teams can design dashboards that deliver the right data in the right format.

Tool selection comes next. For example, while legacy BI tools may be familiar, they may lack the ability to connect with cloud-based data sources. Consider Power BI, which is capable of leveraging large amounts of historical data for a complete data refresh but doesn’t have the features needed for an incremental refresh.

It’s also worth considering the type of database system that works best for your use case. For example, while Amazon Elastic Search is expensive for storage, it’s cost-effective for querying. Amazon Athena, meanwhile, is the opposite.

By selecting best-fit tools, it’s possible to both improve efficiency and reduce overall spend.

It’s also worth digging into the types of visualizations that work best for end users. Here, the goal is to reduce total clutter in your dataset by creating a very defined data schema that delivers the right data visualization at the right time.

Put simply, your BI dashboard and user interface (UI) should tell a story. And like any coherent and compelling story, you want a clear beginning, middle, and end that don’t include any unnecessary data or context. In other words, get to the point ASAP.

Once your BI dashboard is up and running and your audience is largely satisfied with the results, it’s time to consider potential improvements. These could include new features or faster data integrations or could mean an overhaul of current processes to remove potential roadblocks.

Over time, knowledge gained from BI designs and deployments can also help your team streamline the process of building new dashboards for similar use cases, in turn reducing the cost, time, and effort required to get these solutions up and running.

Note that it’s not necessary to ask these questions in order. While one naturally leads to the next, getting the most out of your dashboard isn’t about running through this list the same way every time; it’s about asking the right questions for your current use case and objectives.

The right BI dashboard—used the right way for the right audience—can drive better business decisions and help companies capitalize on their most valuable digital resource.

But delivering on dashboard potential doesn’t happen by accident. To get the most from your business dashboard, it’s critical to understand who your audience is, what they need to know, and which tool delivers this knowledge clearly and concisely. To help teams make the best use of dashboards over time, businesses can’t afford to rest on their digital laurels. By developing a deeper understanding of your audience and their processes, it’s possible to improve the efficacy of BI dashboards and ensure potential isn’t wasted.

Ready to get the most out of your BI dashboard? Discover how PDG Consulting can help. Connect with us today.