Understanding the Significance of Dashboarding in Analytics

An idea that hasn’t been packaged and presented well seldom impresses people. So it becomes extremely important for us to design an idea in a way that connects to the audience and helps them interact with our idea. Business Analytics and data are tricky areas to play with. However, once delved into, you can derive massive amounts of valuable information from the smallest stash of raw data available at your disposal. Although there are dedicated technologies and tools to extract useful information from noisy data, a lot of other tools have been designed to visualize and present the processed results in an organized and comprehensible manner. Dashboarding is the process of using software apps to represent the health of an organization or department by reporting on key parameters, business metrics, and analytics.
What can a Dashboard that a Report cannot?
Dashboards can be perceived as a collection of widgets and controllable-modules that provides an overview of the reports and metrics that run an organization or a business. Dashboards let you alter one or more metrics at once, to visualize reports on the health of your organization or see correlations between multiple reports. They are easy to create, customize and share. Moreover, they keep the audience interested using attractive graphics and user-interfaces. Dashboarding has a primary motive of reporting which has long been used in business intelligence. Summarizing information into instantly lucid analytical-graphs provides at-a-glance visibility into business performance.Dashboards follow a no-scroll policy and lays the entire information on a computer screen using bold visualizations. It only showcases the most important KPIs to be monitored. However, it also allows you to dive deeper into the overview and even attach detailed reports if need be. User-experience is a plus-point with dashboards as you can interact with it by filtering data and customizing the way you want to show it. The data displayed in a dashboard can be updated automatically when triggered by conditions programmed into its back-end. Reports, on the other hand are more exhaustive in nature. They tend to tell more of a story and as a result, take time to be assimilated by the user/ reader.

Dashboarding: When do you use it?
One can use a dashboard for several reasons:

Information related to a particular line of business needs to be reported concisely and monitored regularly, often in real time.
Owing to diverse and complex information sources, summarization of the same is inevitable.
Any deviation from expected or desired values or thresholds are significant and need to be acted upon immediately.
Optimal selection of key information and data is specific to a particular individual or role which can be accommodated by the customization-abilities of a dashboard.
Users require a simplified view of the overall trends for KPIs, providing visibility into the relationship between key values and trends without having to write a query or access a database.
While dashboards are deployed in analytical solutions in all fields and business functions, one of the major consumers is the ad-analytics industry. A transparent dashboard that can provide an insight on the real-time performance of the ads can be of huge benefit to the marketing industry. Most products in the ad-analytics industry have dashboarding abilities integrated within them. Algoscale’s Cloud-based Ad-network Solution showed extensive dashboarding-capabilities that the users could design, customize and use as per their convenience. This allows the reporting tool to be used in different views for different purposes that aim to build a better ad-network for the organization that consumes it.

While there are numerous dashboarding tools available in the market, the key is to find one that gels well with your existing analytical-infrastructure. While most dashboard-development tools require a bit of technical know-how, the degrees of programming-skills requirement could vary. It would be wise to look into all these aspect before investing in a dashboarding exercise.