Actionable Analytics: Uncover Useful Insights to Make Smarter Decisions
Introduction
Since data is the raw material of so many businesses worldwide, leaders are interested in finding new ways to collect insights from their data to help them make smarter decisions. With actionable analytics, business users can access all relevant information in their company, gain useful insights from it, and use that knowledge to solve their problems. This blog will give you an overview of actionable analytics, their benefits, and how Bold BI’s analytics can help your business succeed. This blog will cover the following topics:
- What are actionable analytics?
- Why actionable analytics matter.
- Benefits of actionable analytics.
- Steps to transform raw data into actionable insights.
- Actionable analytics with Bold BI.
What are actionable analytics?
Actionable analytics uses analytical tools to produce meaningful information from a company’s data. The information is organized to meet the needs of the business, providing insights that can be used as the basis of specific actions and decisions.
Why actionable analytics matter
Actionable analytics are helpful in expediting business decision-making processes as they give users a clear view of their data, which enables them to identify trends and patterns that lead to business growth. They also help businesses to:
- Improve their financial performance by enabling them to capture more potential customers.
- Identify new market opportunities and seize them quickly.
- Monitor and understand consumer behavior to help adapt their products and services to suit customer needs and wants.
- Make necessary changes sooner to reduce risks that could lead to lost revenue.
Benefits of actionable analytics
Many businesses have leveraged actionable analytics to boost their performance and increase their productivity. The quality information provided through analytics fosters better methods for handling specific problems in a company, allowing businesses to grow rapidly. The benefits of actionable analytics for organizations include:
- Improved customer experience.
- Strategic and informed decision-making.
- Better risk management.
Improved customer experience
Analytics help businesses track and monitor their customer feedback to get a coherent picture of customers’ overall experience with the company. This information is actionable, allowing the company to easily identify areas where their targeted audience is having difficulties and determine the best solutions to improve their engagement and experience with the brand. This also helps the company retain its customers, and perhaps even attract new ones.
Strategic and informed decision-making
With actionable analytics, decision-makers in any department can make evidence-based decisions to drive their business toward long-term success. This is because leaders throughout the business can use analytics to uncover trends that correlate the company’s successes and failures with specific actions. These can serve as the basis for strategies that capitalize on the company’s strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and carefully consider its market position. As a result, businesses can pursue paths of sustainable growth over a long period with confidence.
Better risk management
Actionable analytics help business owners better mitigate risks by providing insight into factors like employee turnover, sales pipelines, and inventory management. Owners can keep tabs on current risks, evaluate past problems, and anticipate future issues to design a holistic plan for risk management. With actionable analytics, businesses can be precise when it comes to taking on risks for the benefit of the company.
Next, let’s discuss the key steps to making raw data actionable.
Steps to transform raw data into actionable insights
These are the general steps a business follows to turn its raw data into usable information:
- Compile all the raw data.
An organization must first compile all of its data. This includes its own data, third-party data, and everything in between. No data is left behind, ensuring a comprehensive view of the data can be established.
2. Provide access to the right people.
The right people need to be able to access the data. In the past, data access was limited to data scientists and business analysts-people with the advanced technical skill necessary to wield analytical tools. Now, business intelligence and analytics solutions like Bold BI have made it possible for any stakeholder to analyze data relevant to their concerns. Access is just a matter of permissions.
3. Analyze and contextualize the data.
Analyzing the data and presenting it in the context of past analyses provides more practical insights. Therefore, you should display past and current analyses in dashboards, compare the findings, and identify factors that might affect the accuracy of your analysis to help you take the right actions based on your data.
4. Align the analysis with your goals.
The knowledge obtained from analyzing and contextualizing the data automatically helps you set and adjust the goals that your organization strives for. Sound business goals based on accurate data analysis help guide daily decisions in pursuit of those goals.
5. Plan for the future.
When planning for the future of the business, you need to ask yourself periodically whether your current strategies match your company’s needs. This forces you to reckon with changes within and beyond the business and evaluate whether current business strategies should change to keep the company on the right course.
6. Use clear visualizations to show your findings.
You can display the analysis results in dashboards to provide an easy-to-consume view that is immediately understood. This makes it easier for users throughout the business to see the current state of the business and any other pertinent information you include.
With Bold BI, you can connect to various data sources directly and transform your data into easily understood dashboards. This enables you to assess and visualize key performance indicators, giving you a true picture of crucial areas in your business. From there, you can identify trends and patterns, leading to informed decisions that propel the business.
Let’s look at some key features of Bold BI that help convert your data into actionable insights.
Actionable analytics with Bold BI
Bold BI is a business intelligence tool that allows you to convert data into actionable insights through user-friendly dashboards. With Bold BI, you can easily monitor key metrics with your colleagues to identify risks and make better, data-driven business decisions. Its features for providing actionable analytics include:
Data visualization
Bold BI provides over 35 widgets to analyze your data, such as bar graphs, pie charts, and maps. Other features include drill-down abilities, linking to other dashboards, templates, customization, tabbed dashboards, and more. You can visualize your data exactly how you need it delivered to the right people.
Data connectivity
For any analytics deployment to be successful, you should be able to connect to all kinds of business data. Bold BI makes it easy to connect to data in relational and SQL databases, data warehouses, REST API services, big data systems, and local files.
Data preparation
Bold BI allows you to combine and transform data from over 130 data sources, including your preferred data warehouse. It lets you perform actions like joins and filtering, as well as add calculated fields at the data-source level and preview your data in a visual editor. Included access to the Syncfusion Data Integration platform allows you to perform advanced data preparation.
Predictive analytics
Display results from predictive models produced using machine learning environments. Bold BI also offers integrated time-series support that helps you recognize seasonal changes and forecast trends.
Data security
With Bold BI, your data is always under your control. For instance, you can keep the entire product and all its data within your private data center or your public cloud account with absolutely no access provided to anyone except you. Row-level security allows you to maintain a single dashboard for all users while limiting access to the data within it.
Other features
Using Bold BI can also help you easily embed an analytics solution into your daily business application with many essential features, such as automated provisioning for tenants and single sign-on with Office 365, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID integration. You can deploy on Windows, Docker, Linux, Kubernetes, and Azure App Service. To learn more about embedded analytics, read this blog.
To learn more about Bold BI and its various features, refer to this link.
Now that we have discussed the features of Bold BI, let’s look at some examples of Bold BI actionable analytics dashboards.
Bold BI actionable analytics dashboard examples
The following dashboards contain key metrics that can be tracked, monitored, and benchmarked to give users a detailed overview of their company’s performance and highlight comparisons to help them make well-informed decisions.
They include:
Sales Performance Dashboard
This dashboard allows users to track total sales, product revenue, inventory turnover, and more in a comprehensive overview of their production and sales. With this information, the sales team can compare the current year’s progress with the previous year’s to track its progress in any given month, empowering them to take actions that will ensure they achieve big-picture goals.
Learn more about the Sales Performance Dashboard at this link.
Defect Management in Agile Dashboard
This dashboard allows leaders to track and monitor defects in an agile development practice to gain insights into escaped defects, defect cycle time, bugs, and defect gaps. This allows the team to know the number of bugs in any given project, types of defects and their statuses, and the number of defects that have been resolved. This information helps developers identify improvements that need to be made to minimize bugs and defects.
Learn more about Defect Management in Agile Dashboard using this link.
Website Analytics Dashboard
This dashboard is an easy visual reference for both website and financial analytics. It gives website admins an overview of their website visitors’ behavior, which provides insight into the effectiveness of the company’s marketing and web design efforts. This also helps administrators and marketing leaders illustrate the success of their advertising initiatives, as well as highlight areas where the company could put more effort into increasing its revenue in the long run.
Check this link to learn more about the Website Analytics Dashboard.
Patient Experience Analysis Dashboard
This healthcare dashboard provides insights into patients’ satisfaction with various hospital departments. It provides critical information about patient wait times, visit lengths, and more that the hospital’s leadership can rely on to identify areas for improvement.
Click this link to learn more about this Patient Experience Analysis Dashboard.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed this blog post and gained a better understanding of what actionable analytics is, its benefits, and how it is supported by Bold BI.
Try Bold BI for free to create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can also contact us by submitting your questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on February 8, 2023.
