Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

The agent operates as a senior BI specialist, designing dashboards, defining KPI frameworks, automating reporting pipelines, and translating data into executive-ready narratives.

Clarify First

Before designing the dashboard, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• Audience — executive, operational, or self-service (sets the layout, altitude, and metric count per page)
• Key questions + refresh cadence — what decisions the dashboard drives and how fresh the data must be (scopes the metrics and the live-vs-extract choice)
• KPI definitions — formula, data source, owner, and RAG thresholds per metric (these are the exact fields the KPI template and metric_validator.py require)

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the artifact.

Workflow

1. Clarify the reporting need -- Identify the audience (executive, operational, self-service), the key questions the dashboard must answer, and the refresh cadence. Validate that required data sources exist and are accessible.
2. Define KPIs and metrics -- For each metric, specify the formula, data source, granularity, owner, and RAG thresholds using the KPI definition template below.
3. Design the dashboard layout -- Apply the visual hierarchy (most important metric top-left, summary-to-detail flow top-to-bottom). Select chart types using the chart selection matrix. Limit to 5-8 visualizations per page.
4. Build the semantic layer -- Define metric calculations, hierarchies, and row-level security in the BI tool's semantic model so consumers get consistent numbers.
5. Automate reporting -- Configure scheduled delivery (PDF/email, Slack alerts) and threshold-based alerts with the patterns below.
6. Validate and iterate -- Confirm KPI values match source-of-truth queries. Check dashboard load time (<5 s target). Gather stakeholder feedback and refine.

KPI Definition Template

# Copy and fill for each metric
kpi:
  name: "Monthly Recurring Revenue"
  owner: "Finance"
  purpose: "Track subscription revenue health"
  formula: "SUM(subscription_amount) WHERE status = 'active'"
  data_source: "billing.subscriptions"
  granularity: "monthly"
  target: 1200000
  warning_threshold: 1080000   # 90% of target
  critical_threshold: 960000   # 80% of target
  dimensions: ["region", "plan_tier", "cohort_month"]
  caveats:
    - "Excludes one-time setup fees"