One of the biggest buzzwords around is dashboard. The great and powerful dashboard. A mystical piece of technology that will show you everything you need to know about the business and, like a magic mirror, direct you on the best course of action to take to remain fairest in the land.

Malarkey. First and foremost, a dashboard doesn’t mean anything unless the people viewing it act on the information. This seems like common sense, but it’s a critically important item to think about in the creation of a dashboard or any centrally located place where you show multiple analytics.

In the case of an executive dashboard — a central place where the leaders of a company look at multiple data sources that should reflect the operational and financial health of an organization — a company has a group of very engaged individuals looking at data. The dashboard they look at may show new clients, lost clients, new sales, sales territories, workflow metrics for the department, growth YTD, etc. Did we lose more clients this month than the same month last year or the month previous? Are our employees following workflows and procedures? Are sales up or down? The dashboard should answer key business questions at a glance and then allow for the qualification of that data by granting access to the underlying information.

For example, we have an audit on our dashboard that tells us when a policy has gone beyond its date of expiration. So if a policy expires on May 1st and it is May 5th, our dashboard shows a bar chart of how many of these we have and then allows a drill down into the detail so it can be corrected. If there is no accountability to correct that in a timely manner, then the whole process fails.

The more viewers you have, the more of a culture of accountability you have to have. If the company has the executive team look at dashboards and the CEO/COO crack the whip and hold them accountable for the key areas of their dashboard, then the system works. If the CEO/COO don’t, then the system doesn’t work. As you spread that dashboard out to more employees, the company has to have a good system to ensure that actionable items on the dashboard are followed by those employees. This generally means the manager will have some form of roll-up of the department to help manage all the different elements that are being monitored and keep their employees accountable.

That’s one issue with buying a product that promises to make you a dashboard. Most of what we have been discussing is culture. And it’s just one piece of culture that you will need to be able to make dashboards work. The other is data management. When you first start any analytic project in an organization, you find bad data, especially if the analytic is looking at data that has not been seen or used much before. We generate a report from the data and bump it off the existing manual report. Initially, the result is very different. That’s because when the manual report was created, the person whose responsibility it was to generate that report adjusted it to some extent. They used what they had learned over time to correct the deficiencies in the data. I call that business intuition. You probably call it preparing the report. To be successful with a dashboard, the company has to have a data management strategy that programs that intuition into business logic and creates processes to ensure that the right data is going into the right places.

Like anything, dashboards are a work in progress that takes time to get right for each company. The company has to have a culture of action to be able to be effective with dashboards, but they have to be able to see and understand dashboards for that to take place. Kinda chicken or the egg. Dashboards are iterative, and I would always suggest starting with data that is well-known and manually reported on with frequency. That way, you can ensure the data is correct as it’s rolled out. There is not much worse than displaying bad data on a dashboard. The users will quickly lose faith and put the company in a more confusing state than they were before.

If a company can successfully instill a culture of accountability and data management, then a company can benefit greatly from a dashboard or centralized repository of reports. I’m curious to know what experiences you have had building or trying to get dashboards built. What worked for you and your company to get the culture behind it?

Thanks for reading! I hope you have a great day.