How Does an Interactive Dashboard Work?

Organizations often get overwhelmed by redundant data and Excel spreadsheets. But all this data, every piece of it, holds power. Interactive dashboards help harness this power. BI dashboards create valuable data stories for your organization. These insights are all you need to improve your organization’s decision-making process efficiently and effortlessly.

Let’s explore the key features and benefits of interactive dashboards.

What is an Interactive Dashboard?

Interaction dashboards or BI dashboards are data visualization platforms that represent data in meaningful insights using bars, graphs, charts, tables, grids, pivots, cards, heat maps, pies, etc. BI interactive dashboards bring valuable information on an integrated single platform accessible at your fingertips. Organizations can easily explore the visualized insights and make informed decisions about sales, finances, inventory, expenses, and other business operations.

Key Features of an Interactive Dashboard

Drill down feature:

Interactive dashboards can drill down raw data and represent elements in detailed layers using interactive data visualization tools. Thus, organizations can understand it easily, examine the insights, and conduct accurate analysis.

Customization options:

An interactive dashboard features high-level customization options to tell a story through data in a way that the concerned stakeholders can easily understand. You can set the look and feel of your BI dashboard or highlight important sections using widgets, colors, fonts, sizes, placements, and charts, to personalize it for your organization.

Connected data sources:

BI-powered data-driven interactive dashboards are connected to departmental data warehouses, data stores, data marts, and databases. Therefore, all of your organizational data is centralized on a singular platform. Business intelligence dashboards utilize all these data stores to derive comprehensive insights for your business.

Data filters:

The data filter is another effective interactive dashboard functionality that allows stakeholders to set parameters (e.g. data, time, location, etc) to derive extensive data visualization results. 

Data visualization:

Built-in data visualization allows stakeholders to view and share data according to need. Data filters and custom charts further customize report visualization. This way, tracking metrics gets easier and less complex.

Benefits of Interactive Dashboards

Improved decision-making:

Stakeholders can easily collaborate and interact with visualized insights, explore different scenarios, and learn data stories. For example, store managers can automatically view and monitor supply chain inventory levels, delivery delays, or customers losing interest. This knowledge helps in more informed and faster decision-making.

Better data analysis:

BI dashboards combine data from multiple sources to represent meaningful insights. These insights help you spot trends, and identify market demands, buying patterns, and potential declines. The whole process becomes exponentially faster and more efficient.

Competitive advantage:

BI interactive dashboards help you measure your organization’s performance against benchmark performance metrics. As a result, you can cut costs, and improve productivity and profitability by effectively adjusting your operational strategies, financial budgets, resource planning, and so on.