There are many BI and Analytics products in the market today. Increasingly, many customers are reaching for what is offered for free from Microsoft or "self-service BI" from Qlik and Tableau. In many cases, these tools offer little more than visualizations— and fail to spark true business insights.
Like thin cardboard Hollywood sets, the value of these analytics tools is only skin deep. In his recent paper, Analyst and Forbes Blogger Dan Woods refers to them as "flat dashboards." In contrast, "3D Dashboards" like TIBCO Spotfire® are powered by artificial intelligence, include built-in geo and streaming analytics, and bring data science to your fingertips.
Here are five reasons why serious data-driven organizations are turning away from flat dashboards:
Flat dashboards are not AI driven, inhibiting real insight.
Eliminate the guesswork
- Flat dashboards hold you back by requiring you to spend time weeding through data and guessing what might help spark insight. This often requires tedious trial and error of numerous visualizations, and fails to produce insights from large and deep data lakes.
- Spotfire 3D dashboards eliminate the guesswork by intelligently offering a range of visualizations already populated with your data, for instant insight. This agility is thanks to a patented recommendation engine built upon decades of visual analytics expertise and artificial intelligence technologies that augment your intelligence. Without AI-driven insights, you're lost in the dark.
Flat dashboards provide limited geographic analytical insight.
Put your data into geographic context
- Most businesses need BI with geographic context, so today’s analytics require a flexible mapping tool prepared to handle location data.
- Spotfire 3D dashboards allow you to put your data into geographic context with the click of a button. This allows you to see at a glance which regions are selling the most—and why, how, and where to expand your business. You can even monitor your IoT devices for activity and hotspots.
Flat dashboards limit you to a pond of data, when you need access to the ocean
Find needles in your big data haystack
- Flat dashboards are fine for looking at small amounts of data. For example, if you want to look at your sales numbers for the last few years, no problem. But if you have a Big Data repository that contains IoT sensor data from every store you have, with every customer engagement 1,000 times more information can be present.
- 3D dashboards embed advanced analytics and data science tools help you find needles in your big data haystack. This includes Statistica, the leading data science platform, and an embedded, world-class enterprise R engine which can be used to apply advanced machine learning, deep learning, and statistical models to your data so you can find insights within the full ocean of your data.
Flat dashboards don’t support growing and evolving companies
Scale from 1 to 50,000 users and beyond
- If you're depending on flat dashboard technologies that aren't designed to scale, your analytics success can turn into a disaster. That is, once you find an insight, it can be difficult to share it, keep it secure, and to govern the access of sensitive data. As a growing and evolving company you need to be able to depend on a solution that grows, scales, and updates seamlessly.
- TIBCO Analytics is designed to scale from 1 to 50,000 and beyond with one product. This allows customers to gain broad access to self service analytics.
Flat dashboards can't handle streaming
Digital data in mind
- Flat dashboards are designed for simple, small, static data sets. In the increasingly digital world, companies must be prepared to handle real-time streaming, data from social media, IoT sensors, and connected customers.
- 3D analytics platforms are designed with digital data in mind; for example, Spotfire streaming analytics allows you to connect to data that changes billions of times a day to give you a continuous 360-degree, real-time view of your business so you not only see what's happening, you can act on it immediately.