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👀 Dashboards are a distraction.

BI SaaS sales people have done a phenomenal job. 👏🏻

They’ve made the data industry focus on an endless stream of new tools and tech (which they of course sell) at the expense of doing our actual jobs:

👉🏼 Using analysis to uncover business problems and opportunities so that we can advise and make commercial recommendations in the businesses we work.

They’ve convinced data people and business leaders alike that in order to be data driven, you need to collect and look at as much data as possible, at all times.

➡️ Enter the dashboard ⬅️

Data teams the world over right now are building and maintaining 1,000s of dashboards their companies are gathering practically 0 benefit from.

Whilst some dashboards are useful and dare I say, essential, the vast majority of them are useless distractions.

The sad truth is that most of you won’t realise this. You’ll read this and nod along in agreement with me and then go back to your work, building another pointless dashboard for the finance team.

But if your goals as a data professional are to become a strategic and influential powerhouse, then you might want to put down the dashboard and back away.

🤒 Dashboards are a symptom of a sick data org.

Multitudes of dashboards are the result of a reactive data organisation that has little in the way of a data strategy, that is seen more as a service desk and provider of information for the business then they are as a strategic partner.

The impacts of this dynamic are numerous, but here are a few:

• Data teams are hyper occupied with building and maintaining dashboards that they can’t set their focus on other, more value add work.

• Dashboards aren’t looked at by stakeholders nearly as much as we expect and so a lot of energy is wasted.

• Dashboards provide us with no end to end visibility of how data is used by stakeholders in the decision making process (and there what value is generated)

• They are prioritised by data teams as a tangible representation of the work they do whilst move strategic, longer term work is ignored as it is less visible.

Don’t get me wrong, dashboards can be tremendously powerful and useful tools. But they need to be a part of a wider strategic approach - rather than the go to solution for every single data problem that comes our way.

To achieve this requires a mindset shift. 👇🏻

🛠️ A solution looking for a problem.

If you have plans on being a strategic partner for the business, you need to get out of the ‘dashboard factory’ mindset.

While it might seem like you’re providing tangible value to the business by building the dashboard products they’ve requested, you’re actually harming your future career prospects as well as the businesses ability to gather value from data.

By treating dashboards as the ‘go-to’ solution for any and all data challenges, you actually de-value them and limit your ability to add any value.

Dashboards are ‘a solution looking for a problem’.

This is how:

• Speak to your stakeholders in terms of the problems they are experiencing rather than the solution they’d like you to build them.

• Investigate the problem and explore any and all peripheral opportunities that you uncover.

• Explore all avenues and arrive at the appropriate solution for that problem and present your findings back to the stakeholder in terms of value, impact and action.

You’ll soon realise that you may not need a dashboard at all!

That’s how you become a strategic partner!

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Tristan Burns

Find me on LinkedIn or Book a 1:1 call