For dashboards and tools aimed at helping a company achieve its strategic goals, which type of analytics should be incorporated?

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Prescriptive analytics focuses on recommending actions and optimizing decisions to achieve strategic objectives. In dashboards and decision-support tools, this is valuable because it translates data into concrete recommendations and action plans, considering constraints like budgets, capacity, and risk. It can run optimization or simulation to compare alternatives and show the expected impact of each option, so leaders can choose the best course of action aligned with goals. The other analytics types describe or forecast—they tell you what happened, why it happened, or what might occur without advising on the best actions; while useful for understanding context, they don't directly guide decisions to hit strategic targets. By presenting recommended actions, indicators of success, and the projected outcomes, prescriptive analytics empowers proactive management and strategy execution. For example, a dashboard might suggest which customer segments to target with promotions, how to allocate marketing spend, and the expected lift in revenue and margins, given constraints.