202202201116 dashboards

• Dashboards are ignored or not used
• Why?
  • Unless the metrics on the dashboard are important to them
  • Similar to folks who check stock prices more often for the stocks they owned
  • "Without an external source of motivation, it’s the default state of dashboards and other self-serve tools to be forgotten." ^[1]
• Getting people to use dashboards
  • Book meetings and force people to review the dashboard and discuss the number
• But dashboards are not wasted resources. It might be beneficial for the analyst or others to go back in the future and see the work that has happened.

Jobs of dashboards:

1. Helps us know when to make a decision - if it's important enough to have a dashboard, we should have a meeting to force the discussion of the dashboard.
2. Self Service (access & exploration) - Give people the data/tools to explore and find stuff out on their own.
   • Problems: - It's hard to get them at the right level, either too detailed or not detailed enough - People need to be trained on using the dashboard
3. Specialized Tool - Similar to a fire alarm control panel, these dashboards are used infrequently but are highly specialized.
4. For you - A dashboard you create to answer an immediate question, and will only use again when someone returns with another question.

Alternatives to Dashboards

• Pull to Push - Move to alerts instead of dashboards, telling people when they need to pay attention to something. Really difficult to figure out the thresholds to set for alerts.
• Make people more data savvy - Train people to have the skills to run their own analysis or participate with others.

Resources

Dashboards suffer the same challenges that Data Warehouses did - There's a pretty facade, but all value is created in the data prep and the analysis. Once that's done, it's time to move on. The dashboard is just that - a number to watch until the underlying problem is fixed. – @wcbdata

https://benn.substack.com/p/data-is-for-dashboards?utm_source=url https://www.abartholomew.com/writing/good-dashboard-bad-dashboard https://blog.joshlaurito.com/blog/2013/06/27/the-dashboard-lifecycle https://counting.substack.com/p/the-utility-of-an-unwatched-dashboard?utm_source=url