The Business Intelligence Landscape And Where Dashboards Fit In
By Lyndsay Wise, Wise Analytics
Business intelligence use within organizations is increasing. Where BI once served a an infrastructure to collect and report on trends based historical data, BI now serves as a tool to offer insights into performance, strategic and tactical planning, and to develop forward looking strategies. To better understand how BI is capable of providing added insights and how BI can be more efficiently used within organizations, it becomes important to understand the role of each component and how they fit together. This means looking at the back-end infrastructure and front-end applications (such as reports and dashboards) that make analytical insights possible.
This article identifies the components of the BI stack and how each piece fits together. In addition, the value of dashboards and front-end reporting solutions will be discussed to help understand how organizations can gain the most value out of their BI applications.
Data Warehousing And BI Architecture
Even though solutions now exist that do not require full BI infrastructures, common BI deployments still call for the development and maintenance of a data warehouse. In essence, the data warehouse acts as a conduit between operational data stores and the gaining of business insights and the managing of overall organizational performance. Data warehouses are databases that store business-related information over time and manipulate and extrapolate that data to give organizations the ability to analyze information without affecting operational data stores.
Data Integration And Data Management
The way this data is gathered and formatted relates to the integration process. Today many options exist when looking at how to get data into the data warehouse. The most common is the use of extract transform and load (ETL) processes or other variations that focus on pulling data from one or more data sources and storing that information within the data warehouse so that it can be used for analytics.
Getting data from transactional systems into the data warehouse accounts for only one aspect of the data integration or data management process. For organizations, having the proper information represents one aspect of getting better insights. Information has to be validated, properly formatted, purged of redundancies, and managed for quality to ensure that analyses remain valid and consistent over time. Within an age where meeting compliance (i.e., SOX, HIPAA) requirements is mandatory, the management of data becomes essential to the effective running of a business and avoiding potential legal implications that exist based on non-compliance or the inability to effectively audit data and the processes associated with managing that data across the organization.
Analytical Layer
The analytical layer encompasses the transformation of the data stored within the data infrastructure to information that can be analyzed further. Decision makers want to measure organizational performance, identify sales trends, perform what-if analyses, and the like. Algorithms can be developed, stored and maintained to give decision makers the ability to analyze the information stored within the data warehouse layer. In some cases, analytics is coupled with the data visualization or front-end access tool, but in other cases they are separate. In these cases, analyses are accessed through interactive interfaces such as reports and dashboards.
The Presentation Layer
The visualization component of business intelligence reflects how business users get value out of these solutions. Through dashboards specifically, end users can slice and dice, and interact with information through visualizations. Depending upon the requirements or types of information desired, organizations can look at charts, graphs, gauges, interactive maps and the list goes on. With today’s technology, people can develop the types of visualizations they feel will best reflect the underlying data. Whether through drill-down reports or interactive dashboards, the presentation layer is what provides the overall worth of BI to the organization. Although businesses may use analytical data warehouses to lessen overall process times, or to increase processing speeds of transaction requests, the reality is that most BI use focuses on the analysis of key business information through the use of a front-end visualization component.
The Overall BI Stack
Combining these four components creates the full BI stack. Generally, organizations require all layers to get the most out of their information analysis. With advances in technology, data warehouses and dashboards can be deployed independently to address unique business challenges. In most companies, however, dashboards complement the overall BI infrastructure and are used with the purpose of gaining insight into how the organization is performing against set targets - and used to push the company’s accomplishments to the next level. Without the interactive nature of dashboards and the ability to set targets and manage performance, achieving true BI value would remain elusive. The back-end business intelligence infrastructure provides the basis for what information can be accessed. Front-end data visualization tools and applications give decision makers the ability to get value out of that information.
Dashboards and Insights into Data
Although dashboards may be intuitive to use, provide easy access to end users, and give organizations a large portion of the value proposition of their overall BI investments, the fact remains that dashboards do not develop themselves. To get the most value out of dashboards and interactive reports, the people who will use them need to invest the time to understand what information they require and how they want to measure and monitor performance. One of the key benefits of dashboard use is the ability to manage multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics and to tie these KPIs to gaining broader insights into how the organization is performing within specific teams, departments and on the company level as a whole.
Overall, the ability to gain the proper insights into how a company, product or service are performing requires identifying what information supports related business functions and how that information needs to be collected, analyzed and presented. The presentation layer, specifically, is what gives decision makers access to business data and gives them the ability to make informed decisions leading to overall improvements in business efficiencies.