The Future of BI: Action-Enabled Dashboards & Deployable Insights
Sisense Fusion: A product to infuse intelligence
Qlik acquired blendr.io : Blendr.io solves internal data silo challenges by helping SaaS companies scale native integration offerings.
Thoughtspot acquired Seekwell : Seekwell gets your SQL data in the places you need it like Google Sheets, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack.
Is there going to be a change in dashboards as we know today? Here is an opinion on what is waiting for the dashboards in the near future.
Dashboards as we know today
Dashboard as we know today is the evolution from the static reports. It helps unearth insights by interacting with the data and insights. Is it helpful? Yes, when compared to days when people looked at a static report and had follow up questions.
Interactive dashboard helps users get answers to the subsequent questions. It further developed into a discovery tool that can be used by end users to develop dashboards on their own rather than wait for IT teams to build. This significantly reduced the time it took for a business user to get answers and make decisions. The decreasing cost of hardware means it can scale to accommodate the exploding data volume.
Today, a well thought dashboard can bring right insights at the right time for the right users.
How about “the right place”?
A dashboard, for the most part, does not give insights at the right place, even if it has multi-domain data, it is still a closed system. To better explain this, let us consider the following. Assume that you enter in to a retail electronic store and see a pamphlet that lists all the discounts available in the store. You grab it and walk through the aisle and notice that there is no discount details mentioned by the product side. So you have to go through the pamphlet each time you are interested in a product to see if it has discount. You now have the right information (discount details) at the right time (discount sales are still on) for the right user (customer interested in buying). It works. But there is still some inefficiency.
Now, consider a scenario, where these discount details are available for each product by its side (at the right place). It will help the customer make decision faster than the previous scenario.
We must achieve, Right insights at the right time for the right users at the right place (context) and enable actions.
Is this something new? No.
- Embedded analytics is a concept that has been around for quite some time. Most of the modern platforms let you embed even an individual visual or data using visual api or iframe.
- Many transactions generate insights within their app and present it to the users at the time of decision making.
So, What is new?
Investment from BI Leaders and visionaries
The focus from the leaders and visionaries of BI (Business Intelligence) space is new. The recent acquisition by Qlik and Thoughtspot shows the strategic importance of being able to connect to other systems at transaction or workflow level. With visual experience and interactivity in dashboards being commoditized, the real difference a BI product can make is to have insights at the right place and enable actions.
What can happen in the future?
I believe that the below two changes can accelerate users from data to decisions faster than we are today
No Code or Low Code Integration
The integrations though available today require some coding knowledge to implement. In the coming months/ years we can possibly see a no code/ low code integration features available in most of the products. Similar to how connectors are available to fetch data from the sources with no code, we may have options to connect insights to workflows or transactions with ease.
Sisense is probably well ahead in these as you can see that as their product’s main objective. Sisense blox is a product that will let you trigger actions to external systems from the dashboards. Also Einstein Analytics lets user commit salesforce.com transactions. With mulesoft there is no limit to apps that Einstein analytics or Tableau can connect and commit transactions in the future.
Generate Insights centrally and Deploy globally
As discussed above in the article, today transaction applications that generate insights and present it to the users to take informed decisions. However, most of these insights remain with the transaction system and may not flow to the down stream applications in the workflow. The downstream application may regenerate the same insights to validate or commit further transactions. Instead, how about generating insights centrally in the BI platform and deploy /embed them on demand to any transaction applications.
This requires organizations to reimagine the analytics and transaction landscape. So far these two are kept in silos with little or no machine to machine interaction.
We have to wait and see how these acquisitions transform into integrated product features to deliver value for the customers.
