Done with Dashboards?

Let’s visualize logging to a cool BI and Analytics tool and seeing a screen full of colorful charts with a bunch of lines, bars, dots, bubbles, boxes, maps, and millions of data-filters and the ability to drill-down to infinity.

……however, the general feeling would be that you have a lot of information but, your notion of empowerment may not be real.

Let’s ask some serious questions:

1.  Is data visibility giving you accurate insights or its only your interpretation of a dashboard designer’s intent?
2.  What are the important metrics that you need to focus on (we poor humans can only focus on a limited number of data dimensions at a time)?
3.  What data points are outliers (what is really great or too bad)?
4.  How many metrics have reached an upper or lower controlled limit?
5.  Can you see a business-relevant correlation between any two metrics of all available metrics? (not just what was only coded by a dashboard developer)
6.  Can you discover business trends for all available and relevant metrics? (not just what was only coded by a dashboard developer)
7.  Is your expensive (and maybe closer to your heart) BI and Analytics tool just glorified Excel?
8.  Are too many data points overwhelming?

And many more questions like these. Certainly, the simple question to ask: is your analytics solution pushing the relevant insights to you or are you attempting to get it yourself. Is system posting un-obvious and hidden insights relevant for:

A. That moment of time B. The user’s persona C. To take actions

and finally, the insights must be super simple for humans to understand (….this is nirvana).

In short, the time has come to discuss a different approach and the term that I would like to introduce as ‘Anti-Dashboards’. However, I intend to not discredit Dashboards at all. But rather reevaluate its use, limitations and primarily seek improved business insight sharing approaches.

Lastly, in this paper, I would like to introduce 2 features that Lumenore is offering and that are leading towards my Anti-Dashboards philosophy.

1. Do You Know – Augmented Analytics: System-driven insights that are narrated in simple English and are user-persona relevant.

2. Ask Me – Natural Language Query: Simply type (or Ask a question to Amazon Alexa or Google Home) and get your answers immediately.

Try it for yourself! It is completely self-service.

– Amit Soni CTO