Tag: Business Intelligence

When considering a BI solution, focus on a human-centric approach to software design. The business is comprised of people (not machines) and software solutions must satisfy user needs, rather than focusing on a particular platform, framework or technology. This human-centric approach is critical to creating any kind of software or interface, but especially so when one considers business intelligence (BI) user interfaces and dashboards. Key Performance Indicators and metrics are key to business success but ease-of-use and intuitive displays, reporting and personalized dashboards are crucial if users are to leverage, and optimize BI solutions, to get the most out of data and information. But, showing the data is not all there is to design. You must show the data in a way that is intuitive and meaningful to users, no matter what their role, focus, function, or skill level.

‘Key Performance Indicators’ or KPIs as we say, are very important to the enterprise and nearly every company is talking about them, these days. But, there are still a lot of businesses that don’t know how to define the right KPIs to get a good picture of success. To really understand where you are succeeding and where you are falling short, you have to measure the right things. For example, if your goal is to increase sales in the Minneapolis store by 5% in the year 2015, you couldn’t determine success by establishing a KPI to measure the number of shopping bags you have on hand in the store.