3 years ago, I embarked on a mission to design and deploy dashboard. The overarching vision is to utilise dashboard as a tool to enable business analytics and to learn on how to improve business operations. From a moment of self reflection as of today, it is interesting to realise a key lesson from my mission. This lesson stems from the misconception that dashboard will allow users to learn and improve their business.

Users not Ready for Dashboard

One major feedback from users that they are unable to use the dashboard is due to the timeliness refresh of the dashboard. Hearing this remark makes one ponder why organisation should not view tool like dashboard as a magic pill to resolve business issues. It also jerk a reality check to me on the efforts that users can find any excuse not to use a tool. After all, it is always easy to blame tools like dashboard because it is passive and does not include machine learning capabilities to retort. Users are the missing learning components to analyse the data and perform corrective actions.

Ugly Truths with Dashboard

If management query the effectiveness of the dashboard, it is showing the ignorance and disconnect of management to the operations. The right question should be asking the users what they have learn from the dashboard. What else will you like to learn from the dashboard? Dashboard and data analytics reveal ugly truths from the operations. This is why many resist the adoption of Dashboard for the review of SOP (Standard Operating Procedures). Typical excuse you will hear is blaming the dashboard for data timeliness, incorrect data or data errors. It is not surprising because the truth leads to change! Change is something that operations or quality hate to indulge!

The key lesson from adopting Dashboard is to acknowledge that it will not automatically equates users to learn from Dashboard. Users will choose to ignore the ugly truth from dashboard to avoid changes. You must ensure at least monthly review of Dashboard check on what users learn and to improve the SOP. Dashboard is not a forum to complain on data timeliness and data errors.