Posts tagged: BI4Web

Business intelligence solutions are becoming increasingly essential elements in organizations. The main reason is that they are crucial for digital transformation processes due to their technological component that facilitates access to information and their impact on organizational culture, which is moving towards data-driven decision-making.

Like any advancement, BI solutions are conducive to new scenarios within organizations that represent new opportunities and challenges. The advantages are gaining popularity, and we invite you to read our articles:

• Keys to decision-making in companies
• Take your marketing strategy to the next level with BI4Web
• How to improve project management with Business Intelligence

In these articles, we address the impact of Business Intelligence in different areas of companies. Regarding the challenges, information security represents relevant aspects for protecting against threats and complying with current data processing regulations.

How to securely manage your organization’s data?

It is essential to consider what data you handle, for what purpose, and which people within the organization should have access. For this last point, it is recommendable to assign access permissions considering the need-to-know principle. In this way, only those users who legitimately need access to the information will have it. By delimiting each person in the organization to the data based on their role, you can mitigate the risks associated with the inappropriate use of data.

Another relevant aspect is the maintenance of access logs that allow tracking of who accesses the information. For this, it is necessary to provide mechanisms that prevent to share access credentials and other non-recommended practices.

Regarding the previous points, it is relevant to work with Business Intelligence solutions that facilitate the implementation of these measures. In this regard, BI4Web stands out for its efficient and secure data management from user and dashboard creation.

BI4Web: The secure BI solution for your data

Thanks to the architecture of BI4Web, data management, permissions, and users offer information security with efficient time utilization. Why? Because it allows you to create intelligent dashboards that display the information corresponding to each user without the necessity of creating one for each user, as is usual with other market options.

A clear example is a sales dashboard that shows the individual sales performance of each salesperson but also allows a regional sales manager to view sales for a specific region. Visualization privileges are associated with each user, so they always correspond to the responsibilities assigned to the employee.

Regarding sharing information, BI4Web enables sharing dashboards with colleagues via email. This functionality is not enabled to share information with people outside the organization. Additionally, shared links have limitations in terms of time and maximum number of uses.

If you share it via email, the receiving colleague can only navigate through the shared information. This way, they can access all the visualization advantages of BI4Web without any unwanted access to other data. Thus, work teams can collaborate cohesively with options that provide the necessary data protection.

Simplified and secure access to data offers organizations an improvement in competitiveness by enhancing their ability to make efficient data-driven decisions.

If you want to access the benefits of business intelligence with the necessary security, contact us, and we will accompany you with the best solutions to make digital transformation and information security pieces of your company.

Project management carries out activities within the time and budget assigned. Different methodologies might help project managers to achieve that goal. However, they need to consider making informed decisions as an essential skill. They can enhance this skill by choosing the proper business intelligence tool and increasing the success rate. Some of the advantages of carrying out projects supported by business intelligence are. 

Centralization of information 

Access to information is the first step to making decisions based on data. When working with business intelligence tools, you can inquire in a single place about every piece of information related to your project, no matter where it is stored. It helps you to save time and gives you a 360 vision of data, something crucial to make the right decision. It also provides accurate data, free of duplications and with high quality. 

Resource optimization

No matter the project´s nature, optimization of resources is way easier if you can track every activity at the level of detail you need. Hierarchical visualization of data can help you find the origin of low performance or efficiency reduction. If, for instance, you see a KPI like total sales drop, you can go through the primary metrics to check with the assistance of graphic representations to identify the cause. In the same way, it can help you to tell the reasons for your success apart and create powerful insights for future projects. All of this assists you in building a tailored methodology for your company or where you develop projects. 

Risk mitigation

Besides optimization, identification and mitigation of risks enhance the success rate of your projects. Thanks to graphic representations, your team can identify risks like the expenses affecting your budget plan or additional executed hours impacting your general schedule. This way, you can focus your actions on aspects with a more meaningful impact. 

Insights for future projects

Insights based on predictive analytics can help you to do better planning of the projects of your company. Thanks to the identification of trends and characteristics of every project, you can create successful plans. 

This higher success rate is based on the greater accuracy that predictive analytics can achieve with larger volumes of data. To know more advantages of predictive analytics, read our article: Challenges and opportunities of working with large volumes of data.

Enjoy these and other advantages for managing your projects with a world-class business intelligence tool, BI4Web. Contact us and start your path toward intelligent project management.

Every company establishes business growth as a goal since its foundation. However, not all of them grow at the same pace or use the same strategies.  

We could mention many experts who have formulated paradigms related to business growth as series production and specialization of production chains. Likewise, how they paved the way to the present when data governance and business intelligence are crucial pillars to reach consistent business growth in any company. 

What is the importance of business intelligence and data governance? One of the most relevant aspects is how they help to answer crucial business questions to make better decisions.   

By its side, data governance refers to all efforts, policies, and actions intended to homogenize data management in business ecosystems. The main advantages it offers are data accessibility, availability, and quality. So it is much easier to have a complete view of what is happening in the company, avoiding blind or partially informed decisions. 

Along with employee commitment, a mature organizational culture, and the proper technology, data governance improves business competitiveness. Overall by enabling companies to have faster answering time in every process with a central role for data.   

The business intelligence solutions by its side provide added value to data the company has prepared to be accessible, available, and of quality. This point consists of giving points of view to decision-makers that help them to enrich their criteria when making decisions. They are good when high volumes of data overpass human capacity to check what information is relevant, so it becomes a difficult task. Data representations offer several points of view. If you want to know the recommended use for each one, download our Guide: Visual Vocabulary. Checking the same data set from the perspective of different representations can help you to detect patterns, trends, or changes. Otherwise, they would be unaware. With this in mind, data experts know how to choose the representation that better fits their intentions of viewing issues or highlighting aspects.  

To summarize, we can say that the ability to organize the information offered by data governance and the revealing points of view by business intelligence constitute a duo that enhances the ability to make business decisions that mark the growth path for the company. This improvement means the decision-making process can be up to 5 times faster. 

And how is this growth consolidated? 

The duo we mentioned enables companies to see opportunities for improvement inside and outside. For example, you can improve your plant production times by analyzing the information collected from the machines and making improvements as moving from corrective to preventive maintenance. It is also good to analyze an organization´s processes, for example, those related to human resources. 

As for the exterior, it can significantly improve the relationship with clients by providing a comprehensive view of their purchasing behavior and anticipating the risk of abandonment. The last point is vital to carry out retention actions focused on the right segments and with a winning value proposition. It is a crucial front of action since, in general, it is more expensive to acquire a new client than to maintain it. 

In a context where more and more companies are advancing on their path toward digital transformation, having this duo goes from being optional to becoming the way forward. Therefore, those who do not update their decision-making models with the help of data governance and business intelligence will be at a disadvantage compared to those competitors who do. 

Know BI4Web, our Business Intelligence solution that will enhance decision-making in your company with the most extensive catalog of native representations on the market. Contact us and discover how we can help your company´s growth. 

Business Intelligence is a widely known concept used for the very first time by Howard Dresner in 1989. Since then, it has been gaining popularity. Currently, most companies are aware of its importance in digital transformation. However, there are still many barriers that stop or slow down adoption.

Identifying these barriers is crucial because it is the first step to overcoming them.

In this article, you will find the main barriers to business intelligence adoption and recommendations for overcoming them. They range from selecting the right tool or solution to having a data ecosystem ready for business intelligence challenges.

Barrier 1. Lack of proper training
Without training suited for a team, the learning curve will tend to last longer than expected, which can result in employees neglecting the use of the new tools or solutions. In these cases, users go back to using Excel since they are familiar. In other words, users should learn as fast as possible; so frustration does not reach unwanted levels.

A good piece of advice in this matter is to identify the most common tasks and lead training to solve these works first. This way, your team will stay motivated from the beginning by incorporating the new tool into their daily routine.

Barrier 2. Data not available or poor quality

Since data is the raw material for business intelligence, accessing reliable data is crucial. One of the most popular misconceptions about business intelligence might reside in the belief installing a business intelligence tool can solve poor data quality immediately. Something completely false.

To take down this barrier is critical to understand that the implementation of a solution must include recognition of databases, data sources, and data flows; and identify problems derivated from a lack of data governance.

Once problems are detected, for example, data silos, lack of centralization, or errors in data entries, you should elaborate a work plan oriented to successful data governance. This plan has to guarantee data availability and quality. As last, it is necessary to understand this is a continuous improvement process and requires the compromise of everyone working with data.

Barrier 3. Tools or solutions hard to use

It is important to choose tools that meet employees’ needs. Since the market has a wide range of solutions finding the right match is crucial. This match should take into account companies’ needs and data vision.
In this sense, a mismatch happens when the tool is too inflexible and limits users’ operations in terms of access and interaction with data. On the other side, we can find self-service solutions with an excessive stock of options which might lead users to an overwhelming experience. In both cases, users tend to quit and go back to Excel.

As an additional recommendation, providing users with the proper companion in topics like training and support makes a big difference, especially for those novel users in your team.

Another difficulty, beyond tools selection, is the poor design of data models that do not fit users’ needs and limit what they can do with data. It is the same story when dashboards have the wrong parameters or are overloaded with them.

Last point but not least, pay attention to the speed of queries. If this is too slow, the experience for users will be deprecated. Make sure your infrastructure setup can guarantee it.

Barrier 4. Lack of data culture

Organizational culture is important to foster changes in companies, and business intelligence adoption is not the exception. That is why it is necessary to work involving the whole team.

Every employee needs to be aware of their role and fulfill it. C-level executives must lead change with their own example by using the BI tool themselves and encouraging their teams to use it. Otherwise, the way to a mature data culture will be impossible, and the acquisition of any business intelligence tool will be useless.

Middle managers should prioritize projects that can provide early victories to help their teams to incorporate Business Intelligence tools. Working all together will achieve a business intelligence adoption across all the organization.
As we mentioned before, identifying these barriers is crucial to overcoming them. In that sense, choosing a tool at the BI4Web level is an important step to having the necessary bases to overcome the barriers. With BI4Web, you can have the flexibility your users need without sacrificing data governance. They can access analytic documents according to permissions and navigate through them at the level of detail users might need.

Another remarkable contribution of BI4Web to business intelligence adoption is to have a short learning curve, so you will not have to invest too many resources for your team training.

A dashboard well designed is a very important asset when making decisions, that is why we bring these tips that can help you to succeed in your next dashboard design.

With this advice, you will get readers to focus on what actually matters not on distracting elements.

Before beginning, we share with you a list of concepts we will be using in this article.

• Dashboard: It is a set of representations that help to monitor and analyze in a visual way one or several concepts.
• User: Is who will be using the information to answer questions with dashboard help.
• Graphic representation: It is the representation of data using visual resources, some examples are: bar graphics, a gauge of state, treemap, etc.
• Hierarchical representation: It is a subset of graphic representations, which organizes data in a tree structure or uses father/son relations.
• Context: Physical environment or situation in which the meaning of what is talked about depends

With these concepts clarified, we share with you our list of useful tips to improve your dashboards.

Use the same colors to represent the same things

To make it easier for the user to visualize and understand the context, it is recommended that you assign and use a specific color for each concept. In this way, the user will not have to see the legend of all graphic representations, at all times, but at a glance, they will know what concept you are talking about.

When assigning colors to concepts, be aware some colors have a strong connotation and this might distort the reader’s perception. That is the case for red, yellow, and green which usually represent a rate of bad, regular, and good.

For example, if you are doing a sales graphic and use the color red in the representation, the first impression would be negative, even if that is not the case.

Do not forget to keep clean lines

Give the information the space it needs, do not place it all in the same spot, nor use 3D effects, something very 90s and with a great power to distract. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, a dashboard has to be easy to consult and does not need any effort to differentiate elements.

This is an example of what a chart looks like with no space being given. In this case, it is impossible to visualize the data that is between 60% and 100% of the X axis. The overlapping of elements makes this chart useless to visualize all the data.

What solutions can be proposed? One option would be to change the scale of horizontal from linear to exponential, another option would be to filter by continent or finally evaluate how relevant the area of the circles is and replace it with a scatter chart.

Do not use 3D graphic representations

There are not as many cases where 3D representations are effective. One of their biggest problems is they tend to hide information because of overlapping, keep in mind we are representing information in a 2D support (paper or screen)

In this graphic, we can see when information is hidden. The overlapping here is that bad, that it is impossible to answer the question, how many people watch TV more than 4 hours a day?

To answer that question we need to see the information represented in the green color of the text, how many hours do you watch per day? (¿Cuántas horas al día ve?) But, since all the other concepts hide it completely it is impossible to see.

A solution that might come to your mind is to add a control to rotate the graphic, but it is important to remember the previous point and keep user attention focused on information and not on unnecessary and distracting efforts.

Take into account graphics bar should start at 0 in the value exis

Remember, our comprehension is very visual, mostly because more than 50% of our brain is intended to process visual information. Making it easier for us to remember physical features like the difference in the size of two objects that the actual value they represent. This is why if graphic bars do not start at 0 it becomes more difficult for readers to have an accurate perception and misunderstand the information.

In this example, you can see how the X axis starts at 200 and creates an illusion that looks like on 12th September there were double of visits and clicks as on 27th October.

Choosing the right graphic is a key step to represent information properly. This is why we are giving you a list of recommendations that will help you to pick up the graphic that meets better your needs.

You can start asking questions like: What type of values are you going to represent? What relation is there among values? How many series do I need to define? This way you can narrow your options. After solving these questions, choose the category that suits your representation needs better:

Deviation: Emphasise on variations in relation to a reference point, usually this point is zero, but it also can be a target value or a long-term average value.

Examples: commercial superavit/deficit or climate change.

Correlation: Shows relations between one or more variables. Keep in mind if you do not indicate otherwise, most readers will understand shown relations as causals, it means one is caused by the other.

Examples: inflation and unemployment, incomes, and life expectancy.

Ranking: It is recommended when an item’s position in an ordered list is more important than its relative or absolute values. Do not doubt to highlight interesting points.

Examples: wealth, privation, league positions, democratic election result.

Distribution: This shows values in data sets and how frequently they happen. How distribution is made might be helpful to highlight lake of uniformity or equality in data.

Examples: income distribution, population distribution (age/sex), inequitiy.

Magnitude: Shows size comparisons. These can be relatives (only being able to see the biggest differences) or absolutes (seeing small differences is a must)

Usually shows amounts as dollars, people or barrels, but no percentages or calculated rates.

Examples: raw materials production, market capitalization, and volumes in general.

From a part to the whole: It shows an entity in its constitutive elements. If the reader’s interest is only focused on component size, consider using a magnitudes graphic instead.

Examples: Fiscals budget, company structures, national elections result.

Spatial: Besides location maps, they are used only when precise location and graphic patterns in data are more important to readers than anything else.

Examples: Population density, natural resources location, risk or impact of natural disasters, captation zones, election results variations.

If you want to read more about this topic, download Guide: Visual vocabulary of RCM Software, clicking here