Introduction
Data analysis is the first step in any company’s decision-making capabilities. It is necessary to have a proper understanding of data to create engaging and informative dashboards. Once the data is cleaned and analyzed using your tools, it is time to lay it out in a visually appealing yet understandable dashboard.
Unveiling the Shadow Tracker
Have you ever heard of the term’ shadow tracker?’ If you have not, that is OK. When you think of shadow tracker, you may think of behind-the-scenes analysis, a computer crunching numbers you cannot see. That is what it is, but shadow trackers refer more to what is being done with the data once it has been analyzed. For any company to run effectively, your team must understand previous forecasting and the demands met to make accurate predictions for the future. Shadow trackers can help you do just that. By presenting all your data in an organized manner, you can have a beautiful layout of everything you want to see, past and present, and perform easy analysis to determine your future.
Refrain from presenting your data ever again. The way to ensure everyone understands your data is by providing you know-it yourself; shadow trackers are the way to do it. Shadow trackers display key performance indicators, make sure you are looking at relevant data in one place, and track corporate functions such as sales, security, network performance, and finance.
Take a stakeholder’s meeting, for example; what would be the best way to display your data? Through nonsensical numbers that will take hours to sift through and bore your audience before you can get through the presentation? Or, instead, opt for fun, interactive ways to display how well your company is doing. Shadow trackers ensure that you can keep your audience engaged with all the correct information displayed in the right way at the right time.
Evolution of Shadow Trackers
Shadow trackers have been around for decades; using Business Intelligence, companies have relied on data dashboards for all kinds of reporting and visualization. However, traditional dashboards often need more vision, rely on dated technologies, and have more specific capabilities, such as Machine-Learning prediction. Developers have noticed the need for a new type of dashboard, capable of many more.
Modern dashboards have better accessibility, real-time interactivity, user-accessible data integration, and collaborative capabilities to provide businesses with much more. The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning makes previously tedious data tasks automatic to predict unseen anomalies and unseen patterns and even create more accurate future predictions.
With the new and improved dashboards, the possibilities are endless; you can easily access, analyze, create engaging visualizations, and share across any (compatible) platform. You no longer need to rely on anyone other than yourself to meet all your organization’s data analysis needs.
The Power of Dashboards
What can you do with dashboards?
You find yourself one day suddenly faced with hundreds of spreadsheets, each with different types of data that you are tasked to go through and analyze. What do you do? You could sit and sift through each one, but that could take hundreds of hours, and it would be straightforward to miss little details.
Dashboards are an efficient way to analyze relevant data, especially in critical areas. When you use dashboards, you can measure customer metrics, financial, sales, logistics information, web analytics, and even create forecasts of what is to come. Dashboards can be highly versatile, used to analyze complex data whether you are an expert or a beginner.
Dashboards are essential because they provide a more efficient platform to make better informed, data-driven decisions. They can be dynamic and interactive and show real-time data for a more precise view of what is happening.
Personalized insights for your stakeholders
- Shadow trackers offer unique insights into high-level financial metrics. When presenting to stakeholders, dynamic or interactive dashboards can foster collaboration during meetings and increase efficiency in decision-making.
Predictive Analysis
- Through machine learning algorithms, dashboards can recognize patterns, forecast trends, and identify anomalies, allowing organizations to be proactive rather than just reactive.
Accessible data
- This does not mean that anyone can access dashboards at any time. Instead, the democratization of data means individuals across your organization can quickly interpret data given in dashboards, making the information accessible to everyone.
Interactive Visualization
- As a bonus, dashboards can be portrayed with interactive visuals such as real-time updates, personalized depending on the user, creating increased collaboration between team members, centralized view of multiple data sources, and a mix of real-time and past data.
What are the standard dashboards you can use?
Operational Dashboards
- Operational dashboards are meant for the day-to-day activities of your business. By providing you with real-time data, operational dashboards will display metrics, allowing your team to track performance and identify issues as they occur. For example, in a customer support scenario, operational dashboards will be constantly updated with the number of calls one support agent receives daily, the duration of these calls, and customer satisfaction ratings so that a manager can keep track of what is done right or wrong.
Strategic dashboards
- Strategic dashboards focus on a business’s long-term goals and objectives. These dashboards display Key Performance Indicators and are usually updated monthly, quarterly, or yearly. This helps track metrics such as revenue growth, customer acquisition, and even product performance, allowing decision-makers to see progress and make decisions such as investments.
Analytical dashboards
- Analytical dashboards are used to dive deep into past data to identify trends and even uncover hidden insights. They include advanced data visualization tools and filters for in-depth analysis. Analytical dashboards are the ones for you to examine marketing data such as website traffic, conversion rates, and customer demographics to identify patterns in effective marketing strategies.
Look to the Future with Shadow-trackers!
Although ‘shadow’ may allude to what is behind you, in this case, shadow trackers are the future. It is only possible to function with visual representations and analysis tools. Work with Prudent’s talent team and avail yourself of the most trending business models you aim for. What are you waiting for? Click here now to look to the future with confidence and clarity!