Most people treat dashboards as an integral part of Business Intelligence. Not only do they present a consolidated view of information across departments within an organization, but they are also pivotal in informed decision-making. As data volumes increase, the role of dashboards in identifying trends and generating detailed analytical reports becomes much more critical. Yet, we continue to hear people say that dashboards are dying. It seems strange, but deep-diving into the essence of the statement, one realizes that it is not far from the truth. The reasons are aplenty, but we will look into a few of the major ones here that we witnessed from our first-hand experience. 

Data Discovery:  When people initially started building dashboards, there wasn’t a lot of data around. So it was rather easy to construct a dashboard that showed the small number of metrics to be tracked. But today, with burgeoning sets of data, it is highly probable that a business user may miss out on some key insights from the vast ocean of numbers floating around. Or even so, by the time a user identifies an integral data inflection from this pandemonium, it may already have been averaged away, giving a unclear view of things.  

Humongous Data Sources: Come to think of it, enterprises use a large number of dashboards across departments, each day. The sales team uses different dashboards, the customer-relation team uses another set of dashboards, and so on. With tons of data flying around from different sources, it becomes difficult to keep a track of the latest updates, especially for someone who wants to have a holistic overview of the overall process. That person has to switch between multiple platforms that harbor the dashboards to stay on top of data, often leading to confusion. 

Analysis Fatigue & Time Constraints: The other problem with dashboards is that they are inherently bad for analytical data explorations, especially when it comes to non-obvious insights within your business. One can’t be expected to know what set of analysis is relevant and what is not all the time. Analysis fatigue is a real challenge faced by enterprises and is a big drain on man-hours. Although there are no standard industry numbers for this, yet it is believed that in comparison to setting-up a dashboard, the process of customizing analysis for obtaining meaningful insights consumes 45% more man-hours. 

Broken Communication: When a dashboard is created, it involves multiple stakeholders with a diverse set of roles and hierarchies. There might be a colleague who is tasked with presenting a report on the latest trends observed in last week’s sales, while your senior manager might be working on adding a new set of metrics that truly reflect the organization’s growth outlook for the quarter, encompassing sales & HR. But with scattered sets of data in play, it so happens that inadvertently, many members within a large team remain oblivious to real-time changes made to the data, leading to low consumption and reduced engagement. On a whole, inter-team collaboration and productivity take a back-seat. 

An optimum solution to tackle these myriad problems is a tool that compliments your existing BI platform and helps it promote inter-team collaboration, enable data democratization, perform a wide range of pre-set analysis, and provide complete data transparency at one go, without replacing or tampering with your existing data assets. A simple, cost-effective solution that can promote synergy and boost entrepreneurial efficiency.  

• What if someone gives you an AI assistant that pools in data from all your dashboards at one common platform, allowing you and your team clearer visibility on everything important, with byte-sized insights and strategic nudges? 
• A tool that tells you which data is more critical, and which is not, based on your use patterns and lets you perform unorthodox analysis on it with a few clicks? 
• A plug-in that allows you to converse with your data using natural language and no technical jargonary?
• A feature that updates you with every minute change in data and notifies you and your team about any activity that is performed on the data?

All these without replacing your existing dashboards or BI platform. Seems too good to be true?

That’s why we suggest you Beagle.