The Dashboard Isn’t Dead and We Should Stop Trying to Kill It

By
Daria Chadwick
May 9, 2022
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What if the dashboards of today were built to meet the needs of today’s always-on, always changing world?

For more than 20 years, dashboards have served as a foundational element of business intelligence, helping leaders and teams visualize and share valuable data across the organization.

In more recent years however, analytics adoption rates have started to stagnate somewhat. Only 10% of executives believe their company is analytics mature. More than 84% of frontline workers report poor analytics experiences and needing better insights and technology to keep pace with trying times.

A contributing factor to this stagnation is that the dashboards of today aren’t built to meet the needs of today’s always-on, always-changing world. Your business can’t afford to wait days or weeks for trained analysts to produce insights from stale data.

As a result, we hear many claims from tech vendors and thought-leaders that the dashboard is becoming obsolete. That the dashboard is dying. That it’s being rendered totally useless because it doesn’t have these qualities.

But what if the dashboards of today were built to meet the needs of today’s always-on, always changing world? What if your business didn’t have to wait days or weeks for trained analysts to produce insights from stale data?

Would the dashboard that has served us so well up until this point still not have immense value?

The reality is that dashboards today are more ubiquitous than ever. The growth of Tableau, Power BI and other visualization tools used across an organization has been significant in recent years. Consider for a moment how many dashboards are currently at play within your own organization.

At a time where establishing data-driven cultures is so difficult , maybe the prominent, familiar method of presenting and reporting on data that millions of people globally are leveraging every single day shouldn’t be disposed of so quickly. Maybe instead of chalking up significant investment in data as lacking returns, we instead find ways to maximize our existing investments even further.

The dashboard is worth saving (at least for now). Let’s further investigate the problems around dashboards today and see how we can correct them.

The Solution

When we investigated why dashboards were no longer delivering for organizations as effectively as they once were, we found some commonalities:

  • We found that when dashboard initiatives were not backed by a degree of centralized management—in the form of unified data models and agreed-upon definitions and measures—the resulting profusion of reports and dashboards would lead to conflicting and overlapping versions of the truth.
  • We found significant dependencies on others with specialized skills to generate dashboards, causing bottlenecks that slowed progress for business-facing users.
  • We found that even when data became available after navigating bureaucracy and restrictions, and had been repurposed by skilled personnel into actionable data, it still took too much time and effort to translate into actionable insight.
  • We found “defensive” data approaches locking down data access and usage.

To counter these issues, we developed the ability for users to tap into an advanced yet simplistic dashboarding function within the Process Tempo Platform. The Dashboard Builder leverages unified data models, creates single versions of the truth, and eliminates dependencies on others to obtain insight. It frees up time for skilled individuals to focus on move-the-needle projects while empowering business users to securely work with accurate data and present it in the format they need to tell their data stories. Finally, it allows the transition of actionable data to actionable insight to occur much faster.

Process Tempo is a Decision Intelligence Data Platform built on industry-leading graph technology. The no-code, collaborative data science, data engineering, and data analytics platform simplifies complex data environments, empowering people, processes, and technologies to work together harmoniously. The secure, governed, high-performance environment delivers actionable data and insight rapidly to all stakeholders, helping to accelerate the delivery of quality, data-driven decision-making and improve business outcomes at scale. Schedule a discovery session

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