Are you looking to build dynamic reporting for your business? How should you get started with business intelligence (BI)? What should you watch out for? What are best practices for creating internal or external dashboards that are used regularly by either employees or clients? The following is our Guide to BI.

First, let’s define what BI is. BI encompasses the tools (usually dashboards) that use a company’s data to improve business decisions and performance. BI can help management and business units track KPIs (key performance indicators) throughout the organization more efficiently. And, though many business functions have dashboards that provide a very focused set of data (like Chartbeat or Google Analytics), a true BI solution ties otherwise disconnected datasets together, revealing new insights and providing new benefits at all levels of an organization.

Attaining this level of benefit is not, as some vendors will promise, as easy as turning on a new tool. Displaying information in a dashboard is relatively simple, but integrating it with the data from legacy systems, updating it for new metrics and new business priorities, and promoting its active use in making decisions in order to improve them — now that’s hard. It requires copious amounts of effort and resources. 

To help you through this process, we have created a number of resources backed by years of experience building dashboards and BI systems: