Once Dashboards are ready, it is important to understand the mechanism to distribute it to make it accessible to all stakeholders. The mature organization would embed Dashboards on their web portal which can be shared both with internal as well as external stakeholders viz. their clients via secured login.
Why embedded analytics?
A single portal for consuming all information helps to create a consistent user experience where all customers and internal stakeholders can securely login and get all critical insights. This also helps in contextualizing your / your customer data with better customer engagement. Further, having a single portal to embed Dashboard also helps to simplify the BI licensing model.
Infrastructure for embedded analytics
In order to set up embedded Analytics, this is more of a tech zone but one needs to consider the following:
(a) Hosting choices: The entire hosting of this setup can be on the cloud or on-premise. Cloud is typically a better approach as one needs less intervention. Modern cloud solution provider viz. Azure, AWS is useful.
(b) The Web app:
a. Front end GUI – This is where the dashboard would be embedded. It is important to have a good UI designed to fit the dashboard and have a great customer experience. See the example below where a Power BI dashboard is embedded in our web portal (Aays Insight)
b. Admin GUI – This is where all administrative aspects viz. Data Governance, Report management, report distribution etc. can be handled. As an example, if you have many users and you wish to add new reports to a specific group of users, you may need to have an admin interface where this entire report management can happen with a click of a button. Furthermore, one has to build the entire web application with databases, messaging services, authentication application etc.
