- The Business Algorithm
- Posts
- The Most Powerful Way To Deliver Data Insights (2022)
The Most Powerful Way To Deliver Data Insights (2022)
The best way to communicate insights? Spoiler: not pdf reports.
Thomas Varekamp
December 02, 2022
When I started learning about data, I only wanted to do the exciting stuff: building fancy machine learning models, creating AI, and doing advanced analyses.
However, I quickly learned that many businesses are not ready for these kinds of models yet.
Most businesses don't get much value from building advanced algorithms within their business. It often takes too much time, or the results are not worth the investment.
However, there was one thing that was clearly valuable to all companies I worked with. It is delivering insights that business people need in their decision-making.
This is something business people cannot get enough of. People in business must strive to have all their decisions backed by data. And they cannot do this all by themselves.
You know what the best way to deliver insights is?
Dashboards.
Not pdf email reports. No, interactive, automated, real-time dashboards.
So what is a dashboard?
A dashboard is an easy-to-understand, visually-represented summary of information that will help you in making high-impact business decisions. It is an interface that allows users to interact with data through visualizations, in real time. Dashboards typically display data in the form of charts, graphs, and other visualizations, and allow users to manipulate the data to explore different aspects of it. This interactivity makes it a perfect tool to find insights, without much technical knowledge.
Why you need dashboards
Dashboards are a valuable tool for tracking performance and identifying areas of improvement in your business. By providing a visual representation of data, dashboards can help businesses save time and money by quickly identifying trends and patterns. They can also be customized to fit the specific needs of your business, making them an invaluable tool for decision-making.
Dashboards can help you spot trends and opportunities - something that's increasingly important as businesses grow more complex. Knowing what's going on under the hood provides clarity and peace of mind for both management and employees alike; it also makes sound investment decisions possible sooner rather than later.
Having dashboards in place can save you time over the long run by automating many routine tasks; this frees up your attention to focus on more strategic concerns. In addition, dashboards provide transparency for you as a decision-maker.
Overall, using dashboards is a great way to improve visibility and transparency in your SaaS business - both for yourself and for those who matter most: the people who use your products or services!
Here is an example:
How to create a dashboard
In order to create a dashboard you need a tool. Below I present the 3 most famous dashboarding tools:
1. Power Bi
Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics service that provides a full spectrum of data visualization and analysis capabilities. It enables users to access data from a variety of sources, including Excel, SQL Server, and SharePoint, and create interactive reports and dashboards that can be shared with colleagues and clients.
2. Looker Studio
Looker studio is a web application that lets users create interactive reports and dashboards from various data sources. It is part of the Google Analytics Suite of products.
3. Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence software that allows users to visualize data with graphs, charts, and other visuals. It is used to create dashboards and reports to help businesses make better decisions.
There are 6 steps to creating a good dashboard:
1. Start with the business objective
What is the goal of the business? Regarding the design, do not make it too complex. If a less complex dashboard can contain all the necessary insights, do that.
2. Define decisions that influence the business objective.
What decision do I make daily / weekly in order to move the business towards the goal?
3. Come up with questions that when answered, will help to improve the decisions.
What questions do I have about the decisions that I make that will improve this decision?
4. Come up with metrics that answer these questions.
How do I convert more customers? Conversion rates -> Where does all the traffic come from? Web traffic over time
5. Find the data to create these metrics
What data do I need to encapsulate the metrics? -> Look into different systems to collect the data you need to answer the questions. Example: Payment provider, CRM system, Web analytics, etc.
6. Put metrics into the dashboard
Merge and aggregate all the data in a dashboard, so you have real-time answers for decisions you need to make.
My friend Christian Wanser on Linkedin posted the photo below, which is something to be aware of:
A dashboard should provide a simple overview of business questions that are answered on regular basis. For example:
What was our revenue last month?
What was the social media growth this month?
How statisfied are our customers currently?
They should not contain the results of one-off analyses. A static PDF report is better suited for that.
Tip: Everything in your dashboard should have a purpose. But not everything that could be useful should be included. A dashboard is just a small part of the big picture. Don’t overload the people in the business with too much information. It’s best to keep things simple.
That's it for today!
If you enjoyed it, please forward this email to friends who want to know more about data in business.
See you next week!
Thomas