Understanding Admin Dashboards
Don’t forget to read the 8 Must have key features for using the BI in Admin Dashboard tools.
The Dashboard is the initial screen that gives a specific view of geographic information that helps to monitor events or activities in an organisation. Admin Dashboards are designed to display multiple visualisations based on the comprehensive and engaging view of your data to provide key insight. It helps in decision making in a quick preview of the work on a single screen.
Who can view the Admin Dashboard?
There are key-items within your organisation that can be identified by their specific icon when browsing and searching for content. The Dashboard contains configurable panels that display widgets that present data to users specific to their needs and actions to be taken. The Dashboards can be configured globally, per-login group, or by the user for a personalised view. Subsequently, users must be given access on a per-login group basis to be able to manage or configure their own Dashboard. By default, hiring managers and vendors do not have access to make configurations to their Dashboard. User admins can manage Dashboard configurations for any login group.
Need to create Admin Dashboard.
There are different reasons to create an Admin Dashboard. It is not generalised for one particular group of organisation or industry. These are some common reasons why we need Admin Dashboards in every sector or industry.
1. Dashboards give a comprehensive view to see all the data you need to make decisions on one good comprehensible screen.
2. Dashboards monitor the most important information about the daily operations and activities.
3. Dashboards ensure the focus of all your team members are on the same goal through viewing and using the same information to achieve targets.
4. Dashboards monitor the health of a business, product, organisational team, or campaign.
5. Dashboards create a personalised view of a larger set of data to show all the metric that matter to you on one screen.
Types of Admin Dashboards.
There are four general subtypes of Dashboards according to different needs at the different level of an organisation.
1. Strategic
2. Operational
3. Analytical
4. Tactical
Some Dashboards are operational in nature while others are tactical or strategic. They are specifically designed to tell what is happening now and match the fast and diverse change in nature of happenings, incidents, events and other activities. Some Admin Dashboards are more strategic and are ideal for executives and other senior managers interested in monitoring their organisation’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. Some Admin Dashboards are more analytical in design and are used to identify data trends or other interesting data characteristics. Some are simply informative and are used to tell a meaningful story with the data. An organisation has different types of teams consisting of people within and outside of the organisation. Each team has a different need for a different type of Dashboard. Example users include command chiefs, CMO, CFO, CTO, CEO, VP, operations managers, senior executives, directors, marketing owners, campaign managers, and even community members. The list goes on.
Admin Dashboards are composed of different elements such as maps, lists, charts, gauges, indicators. Elements can be stacked or grouped together in various ways.
Key features of an effective Dashboard.
You should keep in mind these characteristics while making the structure of the dashboard:
1. It should draw your attention to where it is needed.
2. It should show what is the most important part on a screen full of data.
3. It should provide its audience with the ability to understand what is happening and respond quickly enough to make a decision.
4. It should express performance measures clearly, accurately, distinctively, and without undue distraction.
The 8 Must have key features for using the BI in Admin Dashboard tools.
Hans Peter Luhn (an IBM researcher) coined the term in 1958 after seeing that BI made it possible to effectively lay the strategies, and the opportunities to adjust and fine-tune decisions to reach strategic goals efficiently and quickly. Yes, we should use the BI relevantly before laying down the data structure.
Modern trends of using big data wisely for the growth of the company is picking up race. Some key features to look out for that will definitely put you to an advantage and help you to expedite your tool evaluation process. It makes using the BI all the more relevant.
- Making a cloud-based and mobile-ready tool is advantageous.
The changing trends of wisely using big data according to BI and uninterrupted access to business analytics is strategically mission critical. Be sure the tool you make is cloud-based and offers a mobile application version for access through cross-browser, tablet or smartphone. Admin Dashboard should be trendy, responsive and adaptable to the different size of the screen, adaptive to landscape view or portrait view, via any 4G/LTE network or public Wi-Fi network or hotspot. Ensure your Admin Dashboard enables the user to view the reports anytime, and anywhere. - Customising real-time data feeds.
The real-time reporting system needs the tools to connect real data and feed it into reporting system creating as much near real reports as possible. Fresh or old data could be in the matter of days, hours or minutes old. The customers, clients or employees demand quick feed of data related to products, services, information and response time from a company. It is time to change your batch processing data tools to match with the modern trends. - Drag and drop editing feature for easy visualisation.
Make your tool with easy and simple drag and drop features and indicators on your Dashboard so that you can connect data from any data source. Your tools should be able to create clean, live, visualised Dashboards and reports with fewer efforts. Just a few clicks should do the work. If you find it difficult to make a clean and easy report with your tools then it is time to re-think about them. - Automated connectivity to multiple analytics platforms and data refreshes.
Your Dashboard should be easily able to connect to a large number of systems and databases like Google Analytics, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, Oracle, MySQL, and files on Dropbox, Google Drive, and others. You should wisely schedule the refresh dates and times that make the most sense for your business, team or users. - Periodic scheduling of dashboard publications.
Your publication tools should allow you to create schedules of various dashboards and automate the periodic publication of them to the users or groups of users. This regular periodic scheduling will allow your user to have fresh and real visualisations of your Dashboard. It makes your Dashboard more relevant and real to the needs of your user. - Cross platform access and compatibility.
Your Admin Dashboard tool should allow for ease of access and cross-platform compatibility i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux compatibility. Take care of compatibility issues before deploying your Dashboard tools. Key to success is compatibility. The more compatible your tools the better. Give periodic support to tackle with the further compatibility problems according to the changes in the platforms. - Customised alerts
Modern BI tools allow the user to create customised alerts. These immediately triggers the notifications of the changes to the users that they need to monitor around the clock. Every business has unique KPIs. It needs to track certain reports on demand and notify the user group accordingly. - Users related data display.
Design your admin dashboard to present data and display according to per-user, per-team of users or groups. It should allow the user to dig into your charts, indicators, and tables, display sub tables, other dashboards according to their role-specific information to avoid confusion.
Give single click functionality. It’s even better if you can zoom in and out of charts, graphs, maps, easily move time scales, group by months, quarters or years all easily done in a single click. Customisation of theme colours at different levels. Flexibility and usability are the main focal points to remember. You should design the features that have all the control your user needs at the macro and micro levels.
There are many BI and dashboard reporting tools with many other features. Make your Admin Dashboard with features that will offer the most value, flexibility, and ROI for your user’s business.
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