Wherever you sit in your organization, you probably use dashboards to better understand what is happening in the business, and make decisions.
But are your dashboards doing all they can to help you?
Dashboards don’t create insight. They create VISIBILITY. And those are not the same thing.
I’ve seen teams invest months perfecting dashboards, only to realize no one is making better decisions because of them. Charts update. KPIs look clean. The business still drifts.
The gap usually shows up in three places.
First, metrics without decisions attached. If a number moves and no one knows what action it should trigger, it’s just decoration.
Second, aggregation without context. Averages hide variance, edge cases, and operational pain. These are the very things analysts should be surfacing.
Third, dashboards built for reporting, not learning. They explain what happened, but not why.
The most valuable analysis I’ve seen often starts outside the dashboard. It comes from someone asking a pointed question, pulling raw data, and following the thread until something breaks (or clicks).
A practical rule I use: every dashboard should clearly answer…
“What would I do differently if this number changes?”
If that’s unclear, the work isn’t finished.
The Takeaway.
How do you decide when a dashboard is helping? Or when it’s time to step away from it and analyze deeper?
Thanks,
Tom Myers
P.S. Also, please connect with DIH on LinkedIn.
