How a Custom Business Dashboard App Leverages the Power of Your Data to Grow Your Business

One of the most important lessons I had as a fresh-faced and fancy-free consultant straight out of college came from a consulting course. Blessed with the arrogance of youth, I approached the course with skepticism.

After all, I had an engineering degree – what could a group of wizened old guys, embittered by years in the trenches, tell me?

Of course, the reality was that these men were no older than forty, and their experience out in the field trumped our ‘ideal world outcomes’ academic book learning.

The course – or, more accurately, ruthless boot camp – lasted a month, served up with a drill sergeant’s efficiency. All that we thought we knew was ruthlessly stripped from us, replaced with training and exercises that turned us into the type of consultant worth the invoice.

Aside from the sleep deprivation, it was a grueling month of data collection, data analysis, client reports, and endless presentations, all served up with relentless criticism. In the end, it can be boiled down into one simple, easy-to-remember aphorism:

“NEVER attempt to control that, which you cannot first measure.”

Without Data, It’s Just an Opinion

Now that I’m one of those wizened old guys (just ask my daughter!), the simple truth of that statement is clear to me. Over the years, I’ve seen otherwise successful businesses stall at certain growth points.

Everything from the client base to marketing and supply chains is fantastic on paper – but out in the real world, something’s wrong. Perhaps there’s a brick wall that growth can’t get past, or profits continue to dance around a point without moving.

It’s frustrating. What could be wrong? Of course, everyone will have an opinion…

…But almost always, analyzing the data reveals a fundamental issue, often hidden from general view in silos that only a few key organizational members can access.

This doesn’t sound terrible – after all, there is a reason for informational silos – but sometimes, this lack of knowledge and transparency can lead to different departments within the same business pulling apart from each other.

That’s not good news for growth, which requires pulling together. But luckily, there is a solution in a business dashboard.

 

Get Intimate with Your Data Using a Business Dashboard App

According to Forbes, humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day (X), and your business has a piece of this pie. Some of this data will be incredibly useful to your business… and a lot of it is simply white noise.

Finding the right data is akin to finding a needle in a haystack and not really an ideal job for the human eye. It’s a tedious, painstaking job, and humans, unfortunately, tend to get tired and make errors galore with such tasks.

Enter the business dashboard app, which typically tracks and organizes from time-series or event-based data and sorts everything into a useful and logical presentation that might offer easy to interpret, meaningful insights. Combined with a person within your business who has the knowledge and experience to turn this data into action, and your business can start making smart moves based on data, not opinions.

At Umbric, we specialize in creating operational dashboards customized to meet our clients’ specific needs.

 

What Can Dashboard Apps Help Businesses to Achieve?

How long is a piece of string? Put it this way: you may have a burning desire for an app that keeps tabs on your organization’s paperclip inventory. That’s a great app for a paperclip retailer, but it’s a bit useless for most people.

A more helpful application could be one that doesn’t just count your website visitors but also collects useful information about them, such as the search terms used, the time they visited, how many times they’ve come back, and so on.

In fact, you likely already use some form of localized dashboard app along these lines for your SEO efforts (gotta catch all the keywords!). Now, your marketing department will have access to this information, but it rarely goes outside of marketing. There’s the issue – what if that information could provide a pivotal insight elsewhere in your organization?

This is just one example. What about your sales targets, your email metrics, your accounts, your leads, your… the list goes on. Every bit of data in your organization has a silo which it calls ‘home’ – and all too often, that data is the ultimate homebody.

A dashboard app can free that data, opening it across the entire organization (along with the fresh insights a pair of eyeballs in a different department can offer).

 

Presenting the Data Depends on Who Uses It, And How

Data is really just information that needs to be organized so humans can understand it. Different professional specialties offer different insights, which means that an effective business dashboard app needs to visualize that data effectively for each.

It can be as simple as offering different data interval resolutions and aggregation intervals. Still, it can also go a lot deeper than that. Consider the following:

• FINANCE: Strategic financial management doesn’t move at the speed of light – a weekly, even monthly view usually works well here
• MARKETING: Online marketing moves by the second and requires speedy reflexes, making an hourly view ideal for fast response
• SALES: Supply and demand constantly fluctuates – and your sales team works best when they have and share information through a dashboard
• SALES (MANAGEMENT): Sales managers can easily control their teams from a dashboard that tracks associate behavior with performance (or lack of)

These are all disparate goals, but here’s the key: with one business dashboard app to rule them all, your business can run toward one KPI together. In other words, no more departments pulling apart and rooting your business down.

 

Creating a Consistent, Unifying KPI for Business Success

When it comes to a dashboard app, a well-designed KPI can be tracked and traced at all levels of your organization. Your marketing department understands that their efforts send leads to the sales department, whose ability to close deals brings clients to the other departments.

At the executive C-suite level, the top brass has a bountiful harvest of data that shows which parts of the organization are steaming ahead – and which departments need a little more TLC.

All this, from a straightforward business dashboard app that takes in the disparate data you already have and collect daily.

The trick here is designing that app – you’ll want to ensure that your provider has the skills, experience, and know-how to take that data mountain and make it meaningful. That’s exactly what Umbric has done for multiple organizations – check out the case studies here!

How to Implement a Business Dashboard App Without Chaos

There’s no doubt from the examples above that a dashboard app with visualization functionality can serve an organization at all levels. All it requires is breaking down those silos to free the data!

That often gives people pause for thought: it sounds like a wholesale operational change, which is almost always a costly and disruptive experience. This can easily lead to conservatism where expensive IT systems are already welded into place – and unnecessarily so.

It’s always wise to take a conservative approach to managing limited resources, but the truth is that you can implement a custom dashboard app without earthquakes of disruption across your organization. At Umbric, we design accurate dashboard apps that are continually updated to present meaningful KPI data in attractive ways – while avoiding ‘lift and shift’ disruption of your present systems.

Our aim is to leverage your existing data sources and combine them with our dashboard app without chopping and changing your current systems. We also understand that organizational priorities shift – which is why our dashboard apps are designed around change.

In other words, we build adaptable dashboard apps that don’t just work for you but also grow and change with you. The dashboard, after all, takes from your data sources to reflect KPIs and visualizations, which means any updates have a minimum impact outside the program itself.

In the end, a business dashboard app is a tool that can constantly be configured and updated to provide key teams across your information with the latest data so that they are always working together.

Creating a Consistent, Unifying KPI for Business Success

“NEVER attempt to control that, which you cannot first measure.”

Control is a powerful thing – but it only works when you fully understand what you control. Try to control something you don’t understand, and it can quickly become a domino-like disaster for all those involved.

The coronavirus pandemic is a fantastic illustration of this in real-time, right now. Even if your company has been one of those to continue maintaining a high turnover through these troubled times, there are a few questions you should ask yourself:

• Is your business as competitive as it could be?
• Is your business as efficient as it can possibly be?
• Is your business capable of quickly identifying issues?
• Is your business able to react to external changes?

It’s easy to say “yes!” to all the above but try to answer these questions honestly.

Done?

If you found a no or a ‘kinda qualified’ maybe in your responses, then it might be time for your organization to consider a business dashboard app so you can turn your answer into a yes.

At Umbric, we specialize in creating custom dashboard apps for businesses that deliver speedy, up-to-date information across your organization that reflects your business’ true performance, all based on the data. That’s something everyone can benefit from – if you’re interested in finding out more, why not contact us today to start your free consultation?