Business Intelligence Dashboard
Definitions, best practices, and examples. This guide provides practical advice and analyst perspectives to help you create a best-in-class BI dashboard of your own.
What is a BI Dashboard?
A BI dashboard is a business intelligence tool which allows users to track, analyze and report on key performance indicators and other metrics. BI dashboards typically visualize data in charts, graphs and maps which helps stakeholders understand, share and collaborate on the information.
The best business intelligence dashboards make it easy to combine data from a variety of sources and to explore and analyze this data directly within the dashboard itself.
BI Dashboard Benefits
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
A true business intelligence dashboard turns raw data from multiple sources into actionable insights. This means that the dashboard must be built within an end-to-end solution that includes a data integration platform and a modern data analytics platform.
Improve data literacyBI dashboards built on governed, trusted data allow all users across an organization to more easily understand and interact with data. This encourages a more data-driven culture at all levels of your business.
Help make your caseSimple but compelling data visualizations help you make your case for important initiatives and secure approval from decision makers.
Dashboard Demo Videos
See how to explore information and quickly gain insights.
- Combine data from all your sources
- Dig into visualizations and dashboards
- Get AI-generated insights
How to Create a BI Dashboard
Here we discuss five key best practices toward creating a world-class business intelligence dashboard.
- Integrate your data. Long before you can create any 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Download our ebook with 4 must-see dashboard examples.
BI Dashboard Examples by Job Function
Below are six business intelligence dashboard examples for specific roles.
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IT Dashboard
IT managers need to better anticipate upcoming technology needs and identify underused systems and applications. Effective dashboards can also help them improve security, scalability and data governance. -
Supply Chain
Supply chain leaders use dashboards to keep a close eye on risks and immediately improve supply chain performance. An interactive digital dashboard can also streamline planning by presenting KPIs that help surface connections between disparate data sets. -
Sales
Sales managers need to continually grow revenue, improve their forecasting, and watch for key trends. A well-organized BI dashboard allows them to quickly assess their KPIs and meet their goals.
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Human Resources
This example shows high-level KPIs such as employees by role and location, plus data such as training progress and gender ratios. This allows HR leaders to quickly review and analyze critical KPIs in a single screen. -
Marketing
True BI dashboards combine data from many different sources, such as CRM, MAP, and web analytics. This helps marketing teams boost ROI by understanding each phase of the customer life cycle. -
Finance
This example shows a simple but effective dashboard focused on break-even analysis. Finance teams also use dashboards to analyze procurement, contract and expense data, and find new ways to manage costs, control risk, and increase profits.
Build and share your own custom dashboard.
BI Dashboard Software Capabilities
A modern business intelligence tool makes 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.
Analyst Perspectives
Here are the latest analyst reports comparing BI dashboard software.
BARC: The BI & Analytics Survey 2022See how top dashboard and analytics tools stack up in the world’s largest independent survey of BI users.
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Qlik Sense earned 6 number one KPI rankings including Business Value and Analyses, and 45 leadership positions. -
89% of surveyed users rated Qlik Sense Dashboard functionality as excellent or good.