Business intelligence dashboards for everyone

Perhaps you recently installed a few digital signage displays in your office, and you’re showing some local news.  Maybe you rotate this content with weather feeds a few company announcements.  It’s all great.  People like what they see and are paying attention to your screens. But if you want your displays to have a lasting impact, maybe you should consider adding some business intelligence to your digital signage TVs.

Business intelligence, or BI, is all about your corporate data.  You create BI content using software that grabs your financial information or sales statistics and turns them into visuals that are easy to grasp.  The result is a better informed and more motivated team.

Say you want keep your team focused on the company’s sales performance.  Are we selling more than last month?  What’s our best performer?  This information is critical to the company’s success yet most of this information is kept in spreadsheets or circulated by email to a select few.

Digital signage can help you broadcast business intelligence information to entire teams.  You can display important business information using effective visual aids that are easy to grasp.  Say, bold and colourful charts that update in real-time.  This way, anyone can easily spot trends and act when necessary.

Business intelligence tools come in many flavors.  Some require complex and expensive software to be installed on a local server, but there are also many cloud based services that let you benefit from sophisticated BI tools without the complexity.

One of these products is Zoho Reports.  Zoho is a well known and respected cloud based provider of online business applications. Their reporting tool lets you point to a local spreadsheet and create live charts that update with each new edit.  These charts can be scheduled and displayed on corporate screens, right along your weather forecasts, employee news and other digital signage content.

Zoho is one of the many products that can perform this task with a minimum amount of technical knowledge, yet it’s sufficiently sophisticated to adapt to your needs.  The service is also compatible with corporate database software when you’re ready to move up from spreadsheets.

Cloud based BI services like Zoho are great for small and medium sized businesses who don’t have the required technical resources to build, configure and host their own system.  It’s perfect for small and growing companies who want to leverage their business information.

Your company’s digital signage doesn’t need to be boring.  It doesn’t need to be complicated either, but if you’re ready to invest the time, effort and money to set up displays around your office, you should also consider publishing business intelligence content.  And don’t just display tables with rows of figures or entire office memos.  People won’t be able to read or make sense of that from across the room.  Think graphically.  Whenever possible, make an effort to use short sentences and bold text.  Pick contrasting colours.  Subscribe to a good royalty-free content service for attention-grabbing pictures and videos.  Include truly meaningful content like sales stats, KPI data and other critical business information.

Your employees will notice, and your sales might improve too!

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