The benefits of embedded BI

One of the most difficult parts of a data strategy is getting data implications into the hands of people who can actually act on them. It’s easy enough to make data actionable, if you know what you’re doing. It can be very hard, however, to get people to take action based on data.

In some companies, the problem is cultural. People have been doing their jobs for years without relying on dashboards and visualizations; now they have to log into a BI tool to check their data analytics before they make any decisions. The interruption to workflows alone is a major problem.

The largest problem with BI acceptance, though, is structural. Most BI vendors sell their tools by user, which means that as a business brings more users into the tool, its costs begin to skyrocket. Businesses can’t reasonably add everyone to their tool, or else they’ll bankrupt themselves.

That puts businesses in an awkward spot. They can’t add more users to their BI tool because of price, but they can’t use data to boost their revenue without more people using data to make decisions.

Luckily, there’s a third option. Embedded BI allows businesses to build their BI dashboards and visualizations into external websites and apps without the need for additional user seats.

Many businesses are choosing to invest in embedded BI. It offers a huge value proposition to the businesses that use it, and vendors are moving to embedded-first implementations and strategies.
 

 

Embedded BI– The future of data

Embedded BI doesn’t just help the bottom line. It offers many different advantages to the businesses that invest in it. Embedded BI is quickly becoming one of the most popular BI implementations, and here are the reasons why.

Improved collaboration

Embedded BI allows employees to use data in a more casual way. Instead of tightly controlled data access, it’s now much easier to share data with others and collaborate on different business problems. This is especially useful for solving problems that affect more than one department.

In most business projects, teams from different departments need to collaborate to accomplish a business goal. Embedded BI helps to give everyone on these projects access to the same sorts of data so that everyone is on the same page.

Ad-hoc analytics

In most embedded implementations, dashboards keep all their functionality once they’ve been embedded. This means that, in tools that allow for ad-hoc analytics, users can use embedded dashboards to uncover new insights.

Users can now experiment with various data sets or carry out analysis they previously would not have been able to.

This data freedom is an important part of building a data-driven company culture. If everyone can perform analytics and find new insights, then anyone can improve operations and solve business problems.

More flexible data governance

Even though, on the surface, embedded BI seems less secure than other BI implementations, that’s not necessarily the case. Embedded BI gives businesses more options for what to do with their data.

For example, a business might embed a dashboard on their intranet, which gives on-premise data security to cloud-based implementations. They also might implement a customer or client portal, where users have to log in with personalized business-provided credentials to see their dashboards.

Data apps

You can expand a dashboard’s default functionality with customizable apps to create an experience tailored to your target audience. This functionality is also preserved when you embed a dashboard.

For example, a sales scorecard app is an effective way to help your sales team stay focused on the most crucial performance indicators. The app’s what-if calculators improve the user experience by letting your sales team make projections based on their pipelines.

Sharing and presenting data

Embedded dashboards are useful for presentations to clients and investors, as well.

Before embedded BI, when a business wanted to share dashboards externally, they either had to give access to their BI tool, or export the dashboard as a static image, which isn’t good for driving continuous insight.

Now, businesses can share dashboards with their clients, customers, and investors through embedded BI. They can embed dynamic dashboards on an external webpage and then give their audience access to this page. This allows these stakeholders to refer back to the dashboard when they need to and get valuable updates.

Goal attainment

With better access to dashboards, internal teams have a much easier time tracking their KPIs in ways that everyone involved with the team can see.

Without embedded analytics, users trying to attain goals have to rely on updates from superiors. These updates are rarely frequent enough to be of any value, which means that teams can’t see how they’re performing at the moment.

With embedded BI, teams can track their goal attainment day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and sometimes even minute-by-minute. This helps them to focus on their priorities in the short term and know what sort of tasks they need to accomplish to best guarantee success.
 

How embedded BI can transform your company’s operations

Embedded BI can help to streamline your business’s workflows and optimize your processes, making your business more efficient overall and boosting your revenue. Here’s how.

Streamlined data access

One major roadblock in BI implementation is encouraging your employees to actually make use of the tool. When employees have to interrupt their workflows to use their tool, they’ll either forget or actively choose not to use the tool.

Through embedded analytics, you can meet your employees halfway. Instead of forcing new workflows that incorporate BI, you can incorporate BI into pre-existing workflows. You can embed dashboards on sites your employees already visit or billboard metrics on screens in the office.

Enhancing customer and client value

Nowadays, clients and customers want to be able to access their own data and see dashboards themselves. This is especially true in professional services, where you’re managing some aspect of a client’s business operations for them. Obviously, they want to know how you’re succeeding, and the best way to communicate that is through a dashboard.

With an embedded BI dashboard, you can communicate data to your clients without worrying that they’ll see something they’re not supposed to. You have complete control over the client experience, while your client has access to the data that they want.

These solutions are even scalable. For businesses that have many clients, portal solutions exist where clients log into an externally hosted site with business-provided credentials to access their data. These sorts of systems can handle hundreds of clients, all with the same webpage and embedded dashboards.

Raising sales growth

Data is the foundation of any successful firm. You can’t improve ROI and accelerate sales growth without it. By integrating your embedded BI dashboards and reporting tools, you can give your company the ability to consistently access all of its data from all sources. From there, you can use it to make data-driven decisions. Consequently, you’ll be able to see your company more thoroughly and make informed business decisions.
 

Embedded BI– Free your data from your BI system

The decentralized, flexible nature of an embedded BI implementation can help businesses in all sorts of different ways. While embedded solutions were innovated by businesses looking to minimize their BI tool access, they’re now a key part of many data strategies.

Embedded solutions can improve collaboration, help users discover new insights, allow businesses to further personalize their data governance strategies, and boost goal attainment.

They transform operations by streamlining workflows, boosting your value to your clients and customers, and driving growth in sales and marketing. They’re the core of many businesses’ BI strategy and can help any company make all their operations more data-driven.