5 Reasons You Should Rethink Dashboards

Most businesses aim to use data dashboards for impact but can’t.

Dashboards can perhaps be likened to landline phones — old tools still carrying on to serve their old admirers but the world has really moved on.

With this blog I highlight 5 issues that stop dashboards from being effective and the alternative:

You have a chart showing that your sales conversion rate for the week is 20%.

Is it good? For your product, industry, region? Can it be better?

Without context in your dashboard, you can’t answer these questions. You need to compare your numbers:

Dashboards often contain too much information because it is not easy to figure-extract-transform-load data relevant to each user/role. So they end up showing everything to everyone.

It’s like serving a buffet to an athlete who really needs a focussed diet for running a marathon.

Imagine sharing a dashboard full of numbers and charts 10 different people all having different objectives and different skills. People often even share their internal dashboards with their clients who may not all be experienced in the tool or its interpretation.

Result? The dashboard loses its objective.

Due to their nature most decision makers don’t access dashboards daily. Instead, managers and many leaders in an organization primarily access these weekly or monthly when they don’t have any other choice.

As a result, data becomes a guest in decision making sessions rather than a regular participant.

Mobile means simple, responsive, consistent and specific to the user. It drives agility in decision making for the individual and the team.

In the absence of dashboards that are mobile, you lose out on this agility.

Look for tools that don’t pay lip service to data but really ingrain it into your organizations day-to-day lives and conversations. How they do this:

At Ylytic, our endeavor is to build mobile reports called ‘Nudges’ that do exactly this.

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