Lightning Tools’ SharePoint Chart Web Part can dismantle information silos and integrate your data in a more effective way. Find out how.
The business landscape is changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up. There is now so much data being produced every day that to collect, process, analyse and store it is a huge burden on organisational resources. From new leads to purchase orders to financial data to staff surveys and customer contact details, monitoring and understanding all this information is time and resource intensive.
Compounding this problem is the fact that, for a lot of companies, their processes are still far behind the latest in data collection and analysis. This is particularly true when it comes to data visualization and data integration.
A lot of the time, organisations are still using out of date methods for processing important information. Using Excel spreadsheets to view vast amounts of information is not time efficient or desirable and reports might be literally out of date by the time they reach the primary decision maker. Similarly, internal business processes can cause information silos: vital data is held up in different areas of the organisation, unable to connect to the right people when they need it. If this is the experience in your organisation, all is not lost. By using the SharePoint Chart Web Part, you can take back control of business data.
The double-edged sword of data
It’s been said that Big Data is the ‘new oil’, in that the data that companies collect is both an untapped resource and potentially extremely valuable. When used correctly, data allows organisations to make more informed business decisions that will greatly improve their choices of where to invest time, money and energy. This can have a positive effect on everything from employee productivity to the ROI on their IT solutions and a boost in their bottom line. On the other hand, poor data management can lead to information silos, out of date or even incorrect information and can result in unengaged employees, poor customer service, mistakes in service orders, and a negative impact on turnover.
Data integration is the combination of technical and business processes, bringing together organisational data from different areas in a way that allows you to make meaningful conclusions about that data. Such integration is also essential to the process of data analysis, which itself is crucial to making sense of the high volume of information that we deal with every day. There’s now so much data that to make sense of it as valuable information you need the right tools. This is where data visualisation comes in.
Data integration is the secret to business success
Data integration brings all the pieces of the jigsaw together, yet for many businesses it is not prioritised. The issue of data integration is often only raised when there is a problem, i.e. crucial data is missing from a report. If data integration is not enough of a priority, you risk developing bottlenecks that can not only disrupt your data analysis but slow productivity levels, ultimately wasting time, money and causing frustrations. With a smart integration strategy, your business can take advantage of all the data it accumulates.
Better visualisation leads to better integration
Speaking of accumulation of data: if SharePoint is your organisation’s information hub, then you’ll know already the volume of data that can pile up in there, how difficult it can be to bring all the data together, the difficulty in making sense of it and how easily it can become disconnected.
Using SharePoint Chart Web Part from Lightning Tools, you can view your business’ data without having to resort to Excel spreadsheets or basic charts, or having to blow your budget on a costly business intelligence (BI) product that isn’t really fir to the purposes of your business. The SharePoint Chart Web Part enables your SharePoint users to build powerful, visually impressive charts with the data you have stored in SharePoint as well as with other external business data.
The SharePoint Chart Web Part from Lightning Tools works for SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online, and allows you to gather data from more sources and create more visually appealing charts within SharePoint. This is a functional data visualization tool you can access today, without having to invest in (or train employees on) more complicated BI solutions. Users can build powerful charts in minutes based on both SharePoint list content, Microsoft SQL databases, business connectivity services and external data sources like Oracle using a simple wizard.
The SharePoint Chart Web Part is an essential add-in that you can use to leverage your data so it integrates better into your organisation and allows you to make more informed business decisions.
To find out more about our Chart Web Part and how it can lead you to data integration success, contact us today.
