TMI / COMPARISONS
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
VS A DASHBOARD.
Short answer. A dashboard is a display. Business intelligence is the definitions, joins, sources and agreements underneath that make the display mean something. You can buy a dashboard in an afternoon; whether anyone trusts it depends entirely on work that happened before it existed.
WHAT EACH ONE
ACTUALLY IS.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Business intelligence is the practice of making a company's own numbers answerable: deciding what a term means, where the authoritative version of a record lives, how two systems get reconciled when they disagree, and what question each measure is actually for.
Most of it is unglamorous and none of it is visible in a demonstration, which is why it is routinely skipped.
A DASHBOARD
A dashboard is a visual summary of selected measures, usually on one screen, usually refreshed automatically. It is a genuinely good thing to have and takes very little time to produce once the underlying question is settled.
It is also the part everyone can see, which is why it gets bought first and blamed later.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
WHEN…
/A DASHBOARD
WHEN…
CHOOSE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
- Two reports of the same thing disagree and nobody can say which is right
- A measure means different things to different departments
- Somebody rebuilds the same report by hand every week
- A number cannot be traced back to the record that produced it
CHOOSE A DASHBOARD
- The definitions are already agreed and the sources already reconcile
- People are asking for the same handful of numbers repeatedly
- The question is settled and the answer just needs to be visible
- You want to make an agreed measure impossible to ignore
Neither column is a sales argument. Both appear on this page because both are correct somewhere, and a comparison in which one side never wins is an advertisement.
HOW TO DECIDE
THREE QUESTIONS
THAT SETTLE IT.
- 01
If two people pull this number, do they get the same answer?
If not, start underneath. A dashboard will make the disagreement faster rather than smaller. - 02
What decision changes because of this screen?
A dashboard with no decision attached is decoration, and decoration is the most common form of reporting in established companies. - 03
Who owns the definition?
Every reliable measure has a person who decides what it means. Where nobody does, the number drifts and trust goes with it.
TMI builds both, in that order, and will say so if a request for dashboards arrives before the definitions exist. Building the surface first is faster, cheaper and usually wasted.
STILL NOT SURE WHICH