Are dashboards still the key to (data) success?

If you have dashboard as a company, you are collecting data and doing something with that data - very good! The practice, however, is more recalcitrant. Because be honest; who actually uses a dashboard to make smarter decisions? How often do you actually look at it? Once, twice? Does the entire organization use the insights from dashboards or is it a handful of data specialists who glance at it from time to time? The time put into development is often many times greater than the time spent looking at a dashboard.

To put it to the test, I once advised a data specialist who works at a large company and came to me with this question, to randomly put out some dashboards once. You have to imagine - a large organization has 100, maybe 200 dashboards in circulation. What happened when some of these dashboards were turned off? Of only 10% of the dashboards, the business realized that they could no longer be found and were therefore turned off. The other 90% were not even noticed for months that they were no longer accessible.

Conclusion: the majority of the dashboards were actually 'just for show' dashboards. Sin.

The moral of this story is that dashboards are a means to using data to make better decisions. It is not an end in itself. Because then you end up with dozens if not hundreds of dashboards that no one looks at. Why do you want to create a dashboard; just because we have the data? Also consider what the target audience is for the dashboard. If it's meant for data specialists, then it's no problem that it has a hundred charts, that it doesn't look sleek and that it has 100 filter options.

However, if it is meant for business people, for example account managers, marketers or brand managers, be aware that the dashboard should have different criteria. And let that be exactly the job groups that are often behind in using data and where you have a huge win, if you let that group use dashboards in their daily work. For this target group, a dashboard must be "business proof.

To get data-driven work off the ground, you have to lower the threshold, but above all make sure that there is a reason to get started with it. And that is that a dashboard is crucial to set certain goals and a means to be more successful in your work. Only then will you really start getting value out of data and earn back those invested data dollars in no time.

Directly answers a specific business issue. For example, brand awareness, number of website visits, return on marketing, et cetera. So you immediately know what you are looking at and where you can find an answer. Kill your darlings: don't put all the cool data you have into a platform, but choose the insights that really solve a business need.

The dashboard looks nice and clean. You have to feel like looking at it. The eye wants something, too.

Keep it simple: use a very simple user interface.