Over the last decade, BI has undoubtedly evolved beyond its capabilities to just providing fancy dashboards and static reports. The current era focuses on Action-Oriented BI. This pertains to:
Embedding insights into workflows
Guiding interventions
Prompting Action
Why are insights alone not enough?
When data structures are poor and best practices are not followed, information can become overwhelming, leading to decision paralysis rather than clarity. Even with a perfect data environment, insights often lack the necessary context, convenience, and guidance to help users know what to do next.
Enterprises in the 21st century need BI tools that not only identify issues but also recommend actions and help implement them. The goal is to turn insights into interventions and ensure that data drives measurable outcomes.
Designing BI tools that prompt action
Implementing tools that prompt action extends beyond developing dashboards and reports. The goal is to push users towards making decisions and promoting action based on the data provided. How do we achieve that?
1. Ask the right questions. What actions should the metric initiate?
2. Design for Actionability Clearly show what happened, what it means, and what to do next. It is best to use alert features, such as Microsoft Fabric Activator, when a metric breaches a certain threshold, which will send notifications to the required party. Specific colours on the report will also make the metric stand out, drawing the user’s focus.
3. Make it Interactive Give users tools to explore the “what-if” impact of decisions before acting. Include filters, drilldowns, and scenario modelling so they can dig deeper into data and uncover trends.
4. Automate insights Introduce anomaly detection and highlight root causes by indicating driving factors that contributed to the spike.
5. Close the loop Being proactive is key. Integrate BI tools with tracking systems like Azure DevOps and Jira so that tickets or user stories are automatically created when anomalies are detected. This allows teams to act promptly without manual data entry and provides leaders with a way to track responses and adoption.
6. Prioritise usability The user experience of the BI solution is critical. Tools should be intuitive and deliver answers with minimal clicks. If users struggle to navigate reports, they are less likely to act on the insights they contain.
7. Measure Effectiveness Reports that do not lead to action lose their purpose. Evaluate whether the alerts and insights provided are driving the correct decisions and resulting in measurable impact. Continuous feedback and refinement are key to ensuring the solution stays relevant and effective.
Having a clean and easy-to-consume data model also allows agents to easily understand and consume your data faster and efficiently, which leads to more prompts to the user to act against any anomalies.
Challenges & considerations
With any impressive features come risks and regulations. Therefore, it is always best practice to avoid the use of over-automation without 100% human intervention.
As good as it is, it can be prone to errors which a user is more likely to pick up. It is also important to create a balance between guidance and user autonomy to differentiate between what users have done or plan to do versus what the tools have provided.
Lastly, governance and ethics. The question of security and moral concern comes into play when experimenting with these features and prompts us to consider the safety of our data and the ethical values that are being implemented when automating it.
The future of actionable BI
With the rise of the AI hype, the growth in actionable BI tools is no doubt a game changer with the integration of AI/ML for predictive and prescriptive analytics, embedding it into daily used apps and the transformation from analytics intelligence into decision intelligence, where users do not just analyse reports but work together with them.
Without action, insights risk becoming little more than dusty figures in forgotten dashboards. The next evolution of BI will transform these dashboards into true decision partners, telling us what is happening, why it matters, and what we should do to create meaningful business outcomes.
Make your BI act: Partner with Keyrus
Turning “insights” into interventions takes more than dashboards. It demands clean models, opinionated UX, governed alerts, and closed-loop execution into the tools your teams already use. That’s where Keyrus will design and implement decision intelligence solution that will pro-actively prompt and suggest sound business decision. Book a consult with a Keyrus expert now at sales@keyrus.co.za.