| Ah, I saw a great tweet that captured a lot of my feelings about this the other day: https://twitter.com/InsightsMachine/status/17018601232984842... >“Data is the new oil.” Clive Humby, 2006 >“Most of my career to date seems to involve redesigning legacy reports to make it easier for existing users (if any) to see that they contain absolutely no actionable insight with a lot less effort.” Jeff Weir, 2023 For my perspective: In general, I find most users can't actually say whether they need any given number/visual on an ongoing basis. So large amounts of work go into building dashboards that are used for a very short amount of time and then discarded. Probably we should do a better job on one-off analyses and only dashboard after the fact. Many users don't actually want a dashboard, what they actually want is a live data dump into excel where they can pivot table it. Maybe, maybe a bar or line chart. In general, I find people always ask for more filters, more slicers, just endless options to reconfigure the data as they please. But they quickly become trapped in a swamp of their own making, now nobody knows how this should be sorted or sliced, does it even make sense to do it this way? People think what they want is a 'data democracy' with hundreds of dashboards with hundreds of options with hundreds of users and so they ask for and usually receive it. But they usually just end up coming back to the data team and asking - 'so what's the answer?' What many orgs need is actually a data dictator. On the other hand, dashboards do allow you to establish really good feedback loops within the business so when you can identify an ongoing constraint, figure out how to track it and then force people to receive it on a regular cadence and be accountable to it, you can make a lot of headway. But that's a more niche use-case than how they're frequently used and the skills involved are different - less visualization skills, more business analysis - and you need to be positioned to make sure someone is held accountable. |