BI Insights | 5x Technology

Choosing the Best BI Dashboard Software for Understandable Reports

Written by Jeffrey Yefsky | 7/19/16 9:06 PM

Choosing the best business intelligence dashboard reporting software for understandable reports that can also support organizations on any scale is not as daunting is it might first seem to be.

Medium to large corporations, non-profits, and government agencies all need to get important information to their knowledge workers and decision makers, but how do you handle sharing necessary information? Most organizations utilize some type of reporting, whether manual or via data integration with BI software, however, many times these setups are not the best BI dashboard option available.

With the right partner and software solution, you can run a world-class organization with fully integrated data, accurate and up-to-date BI, all at an affordable cost - here's how.

Processing Big Data

Having the right business intelligence tools is absolutely vital to successful decision-making, but it also requires the right setup strategy and configuration. The secret to a successful dashboard configuration for your business is first understanding the information that your teammembers need to see. Having clear visual analytics that put all the critical insights on a single screen can easily show you the key performance indicators and metrics that define your operations, organizational structure, and future growth opportunities.

The most powerful tools that communicate your BI rely on more than one data set. For example, analytics dashboards that present data as visual shapes and relationships, as well as numbers and words, connect with more users than simply using numbers and text alone.

Having a dashboard software that has the ability to display patterns of information as forms, such as bar graphs, can make broad or unclear concepts stand out moreso than just plain text and numbers. Additionally, it's important to be able to drill down further to get deeper into your data. 

How do you do this? By using a fully integrated software solution such as IBM Cognos.

Your Business Intelligence When and Where You Need It

Obtaining vast amounts of data is only the first step, you have to interpret this big data to find the structures and patterns that indicate valuable insight into the fundamental patterns of your information. From there, you'll want to present your business intelligence results on a dashboard that draws on strategy and clear visualization to give a compact and rich source of understanding.

The IBM Cognos dashboard software system is the ideal platform for organizations to gather and interpret BI on a shared business dashboard, creating a unified experience, yet having the flexibility to be customized for each teams needs. Additionally, the Cognos dashboards can be viewed on a variety of device types and operating systems - whether your team is entirely on Windows OS and in a centralized office location, or using different technology such as tablets, smartphones, and Mac OS, your dashboard will be ready and easily viewable in a snap!

3 benefits to using IBM Cognos

  1. Easy reporting and discovery – The name of the game is visual, visual, visual for all of your reporting and discovery needs. The easy access and insight resulting from seeing your information in both numerical and visual forms is the difference that drives understanding, and ultimately, performance for your business.
  2. Software to match your company size and growth – Your dashboard will be on a platform that performs with both the power and scalability to handle intelligence delivery for organizations of any size, growing alongside your business needs.
  3. Consistent across all devices – These days, bringing your own device (BYOD) to work or assigning devices based on job description is the norm. Such positions as accountant, field technician, or clinical physician might all be part of the same organizations but they need to have information on devices that fit their individual purposes. All of these diverse knowledge workers will have access to the exact same  presentation, regardless of the device or operating system.

The Secret? Configuration and Collaboration!

The secret to choosing the best BI dashboard software is to understand the business case and strategy drawing the relevant data, processing it and presenting it most effectively.

Having both the right partner and software solutions ensure you will achieve the results you're looking for - whether that goal is to grow and scale your business or simply reduce software bloat and data inaccuracies. 5x Technology is ready to help you choose, customize, deploy, and maintain your businesses central intelligence system.

Learn more about dashboard software for understandle reports and faster data interpretation. Download our Business Dashboard Design and Reporting Guide.