If you look at the engagement patterns for your enterprise Business Intelligence tools, the chances are that you don’t see a pretty picture. If you are like most organizations, you have hundreds or thousands of reports and dashboards but only a handful are actively being consumed by your end business users. Your BI team still has a line out the door of people asking questions of your data, even though those answers are readily available.
If you look at a newly created BI dashboard or report, you’ll typically see a spike in usage when the report was first published and then usage dropping in the weeks and months that follow. This means that the many hours spent by your BI team and analysts building out dashboards and reports are largely going to waste. The vast majority of your valuable analytics are underutilized or completely ignored by the business.
The Root Cause Of Low User Engagement with Business Intelligence
Why is user engagement so low and what can you do to improve the situation? The root cause of this problem is that information consumers in your organization have very little time to dedicate to analytics each day. The sheer volume of reporting available to each user is completely overwhelming. If your BI platform asks your users to spend more than a few moments to get to a meaningful insight, it is destined to fail in engaging the vast majority of information consumers.
What Makes a Successful BI Portal?
To solve this problem, you must make the process of finding insights fast and easy. A web based Business Intelligence Portal can accomplish this goal with 4 key pillars:
- An effective search engine to quickly find relevant reporting, analytics, and metrics, no matter where it is stored or which BI tool it was created in.
- The ability for users to subscribe to content for automated distribution via email, mobile or other applications.
- A tailored and personal experience for each user with self-service management of Favorites and report recommendations.
- Exception and anomaly-based alerting that push analytics to users when action is required.
User engagement with BI is a pervasive problem, and one that isn’t solved by creating more reports and dashboards, or trying to enable business users to self-serve and create their own analytics. The answer is to organize the mess, building on the investments and time that you’ve put in already.
Make sure to subscribe to our blog to receive our new blog posts, and join us next time as we delve into exactly what makes a successful BI Portal.
