A dashboard is a type of graphical user interface that often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process. (source: Wikipedia)

Most often dashboards are considered synonymous with Business Intelligence; as a result, businesses tend to over-invest in dashboards. The speed at which data is being generated is increasing daily but when it comes to data consumption mode, we are stuck with dashboards.

Don’t take me wrong, I am not against dashboards. In fact, I feel dashboards are exceptional, but they are static in nature. In scenarios where businesses can pre-define the KPIs, dashboards are (though expensive) the best solution – they give the user complete information he/she seeks on one screen.

But businesses do not work as most of us would want them to. They have external factors beyond any foresight, like COVID-19. Who would have thought in Jan 2020 we will spend the complete year working from home? Though you may argue this is a once in a lifetime situation. Still, the business ecosystem is changing due to technology, economic reforms, politics, and even the invasion of social media into our lives.

Dashboards fail miserably in keeping up with the pace of change. A fully functional dashboard takes 4-6 weeks of development. In the case of iteration on the same dashboards, it’s a minimum of the 1-week task (depending on the change).

To be clear, this article is not about saying dashboards are good or bad. 

If you are one of those organizations that have heavily invested in making dashboards, your business users have to swim deep into the pool of dashboards each time, only to find out that the dashboard is either not updated with the latest data or as the business priorities have changed, the KPIs on the dashboard is no longer relevant.

It’s time to switch to Beagle

Beagle is a self-serve personal Virtual Analyst that promises data consumption from Day 1. The only catch here is how quickly your IT team is ready to work?

Beagle works with 3 easy steps:

1. CONNECT to existing dashboards:  Beagle integrates with existing dashboards (like Power BI or Tableau) seamlessly. It provides no-code connections to the dashboards i.e the user does not require knowledge of any programming language to connect its dashboard to Beagle.
2. CREATE analysis on the fly: Once the dashboards are connected to Beagle, the user can create the analysis flow as per the requirement or can simply use the pre-defined complex advanced analytics algorithms like Growth Decomp and forecasting in minutes to create the required analysis. 
3. CONVERSE on messaging platform: Beagle integrates with your company’s chat platforms (MS Teams, Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) allowing you to seamlessly use data in all your conversations. Thus enabling you to make changes in the analysis as per requirement in a matter of minutes.

Now you may be thinking this is good. But do I really need Beagle? I already have a lot of dashboards and this is just another add-on to the dashboards.