Stop Using Excel – How To Centralize Your Data Needs With Sisense

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Stop Using Excel – How To Centralize Your Data Needs With Sisense

The Importance of Centralization

Sisense dashboards operate optimally when they can quickly collect and parse information they need directly. While you may have started using Sisense and begun implementing dashboards, if your data remains spread out across platforms, it could hurt your results. Without a full data set, results become slower and less representative while making real-time information harder to gather.

Most organizations host their data on several platforms. This includes Excel, CRM suites, ERP, and other industry-specific programs. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with Sisense dashboards, you should think about the points where these datasets should meet. More than centralizing information, Sisense is optimal for combining data sets to find unique and unexpected insights. This combination lets you get more out of your data than analyzing each stream separately, or even dumping all your data into a single place.

You can even integrate external sources such as weather, traffic patterns, and other variables that can slice and reshape data in a variety of ways. It’s important to keep data organized and sorted but integrating your various streams into your dashboards and manipulating it will let you get the most out of it.

Strategies to Unify Your Data

The process of centralization requires strategic planning and forethought: 

• Audit your organization’s data practices: Organizations tend toward decentralization as they grow and fragment into more departments and groups. This affects a variety of processes, including data collection and analysis which lead to misleading numbers. Before deploying dashboards, speak with different stakeholders and understand their practices to find the most efficient way to align data and collection practices. 
• Have a plan: Not all data is created equal, so dumping it all into a single source can have an adverse effect on your analytic capabilities.  Before migrating your BI to Sisense or creating a new dashboard, think about the data you need for specific projects. This helps keep data cleaner from the start, and lets you add sources as necessary, instead of having to strip away data later.
• Start small, go big: Begin with smaller datasets that are generated daily or weekly. If there are Excel reports generated at the start of the work week, begin by moving them directly into Sisense to help get users acclimated with the platform. Once that is accomplished, move larger and more complex sets into ElastiCubes to start seeing more results. 
• Focus on areas of greatest need: In some cases, some stakeholders will benefit more immediately by migrating, or who require a migration for operational reasons. Prioritize these cases to improve adoption and gain more evangelists from within your organization by demonstrating dashboards’ value when data is centralized. 

Once your organization is fully on Sisense, you can add complexity to your dashboards and highlight how real-time analytics, insights, and accuracy are all improved in tandem.