Your users have varying degrees of technical experience; training them is costly.
Challenge: Many organizations have a broad base of users with varying levels of technical expertise — this could range from end users with very basic technical knowledge, to power users with a breadth of experience. This wide gap of technical experience means that the more complex a BI platform is to use, the more diverse training will be necessary compared to that of a uniform user base. Training programs are costly to deliver and keep up-to-date.
Solution: A powerful BI platform with intuitive user functionality while providing advanced capabilities will satisfy a wide range of technically skilled users. With the ever-increasing complexity of today’s BI software, usability is essential in keeping your data analytics accurate. Otherwise users tend to abandon these highly complex tools.
Your users have differing requirements with regards to information.
Challenge: Your user base has a wide variety of informational needs. Some people may need financial data, others may need operational data. Some may need detailed data, while others get more utility out of summary data. Creating one-size-fits-all reports that try to satisfy all of these requirements may take much longer to implement and, in fact, may not satisfy anyone’s needs.
Solution: Consider giving your users more “ad hoc” freedom so that they can get the exact data they need, rather than consuming predefined data. Once your business views are set up and your SQL statements are written, many users would appreciate the freedom and flexibility to create and modify their own reports. They would then be able to customize their data visualizations to best represent their data.
You may also want to enhance your approach based on product functionality. Your users may want the ability to reuse reports and components from a shared report catalog, so that each user can take preexisting reports and components and create or modify their own custom dashboards. This approach will allow users to build a custom dashboard based solely on the information they need, rather than the information you think they need.
You can learn much more about designing effective reports and dashboards for your end users in our blog articles on Psychology of Reporting and Designing Better Dashboards.
You offer a hosted software solution, but some of your customers may have their sensitive data behind a firewall.
Challenge: We hear this a lot — your SaaS application with embedded BI is designed to run on the cloud, but you may have one or two customers that simply cannot work with your licensing model, as they have very sensitive information, not accessible from outside of their firewall.
Solution: Choose a BI platform that is designed to work seamlessly within your deployment, whether it’s hosted on the cloud, behind your client’s firewall, or a combination of the two. OEM customers should choose a solution with a flexible licensing model that can adapt to you and your customers’ licensing needs.
For more information about how JReport and JDashboard take these challenges head on, or to get an evaluation copy of the software, please visit Jinfonet.com.
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