Business Intelligence, Data visualization, KPI
There are plenty of uses and plenty of benefits of dashboards, nonetheless disputable remains whether they truly are helpful with reporting. It depends on the situation what comes out of dashboards' significant restriction: they do not reflect data changes immediately. Basing on data coming from external sources which is refreshed once in a time, they automatically become somehow out-of-dated. Thereupon, dashboards' use in reporting has to be limited, nonetheless they're often being used for analysis which demand confronting with timely data. Due to that, usually there's only one click between dashboard and actual data source.
The more detailed reports are, the more we might be sure of our decisions. Nonetheless, presenting the most detailed reports isn't actually a task of dashboards as they're prepared rather for signalizing the general condition. Against all odds, dashboards aren't totally useless for detailed reporting. Even though they couldn't provide reports themselves, they might - equally well - provide links to reports, so that the reports aren't within the dashboard, but a mouse click far from them.
Analysis is one of the most important aspects of performance management, therefore most dashboards allow to quickly answer to the most crucial questions. As the solutions still are being developed, it's rather a matter of time for more and more advanced options to become enabled. Up to now, managers are provided with answering basic performance questions what formerly was doable with opening external applications only. These days, everything is embedded into dashboards what makes them the most powerful tool of today's business intelligence.
The role of analysis cannot be overrated, nonetheless analyzing - being formerly extremely time- and effort-consuming - have been marginalized so far. Nowadays, with efficient business intelligence supported with well-designed dashboards, even analyzing becomes user-friendly.