Digital Dashboards: Strategic & Tactical: Best Practices, Tips, Examples by Avinash Kaushik.
From the post:
The Core Problem: The Failure of Just Summarizing Performance.
I humbly believe the challenge is that in a world of too much data, with lots more on the way, there is a deep desire amongst executives to get “summarize data,” to get “just a snapshot,” or to get the “top-line view.” This is understandable of course.
But this summarization, snapshoting and toplining on your part does not actually change the business because of one foundational problem:
People who are closest to the data, the complexity, who’ve actually done lots of great analysis, are only providing data. They don’t provide insights and recommendations.
People who are receiving the summarized snapshot top-lined have zero capacity to understand the complexity, will never actually do analysis and hence are in no position to know what to do with the summarized snapshot they see.
The end result? Nothing.
Standstill. Gut based decision making. No real appreciation of the delicious opportunity in front of every single company on the planet right now to have a huger impact with data.
So what’s missing from this picture that will transform numbers into action?
I believe the solution is multi-fold (and when is it not? : )). We need to stop calling everything a dashboard. We need to create two categories of dashboards. For both categories, especially the valuable second kind of dashboards, we need words – lots of words and way fewer numbers.
Be aware that the implication of that last part I’m recommending is that you are going to become a lot more influential, and indispensable, to your organization. Not everyone is ready for that, but if you are this is going to be a fun ride!
A long post on “dashboards” but I find it relevant to the design of interfaces.
In particular the advice:
This will be controversial but let me say it anyway. The primary purpose of a dashboard is not to inform, and it is not to educate. The primary purpose is to drive action!
Hence: List the next steps. Assign responsibility for action items to people. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Never forget to compute business impact.
Curious how exploration using a topic map could feed into an action process? Would you represent actors in the map and enable the creation of associations that represent assigned tasks? Other ideas?
I found this in a post, Don’t data puke, says Avinash Kaushik by Kaiser Fung and followed it to the original post.