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You Don’t Need Another Dashboard

1–2 minutes

Beautifully designed gauges and flashy interactive charts are no substitute for real problem solving. Running business operations through dashboards turns firefighting into standard practice. Dashboards have their place, but too often they’re misused when actual analytics are what’s really needed.

Dashboards sound smart and look impressive. But can they solve real operational problems?

The Dashboard Promise

Controlling business operations with the precision and agility of a fighter jet sounds ideal, but it’s far from reality. A pilot’s actions directly control the jet, with no organizational layers or shifting business conditions to navigate. Modern aircraft operations simplify instrument panels through automation, allowing pilots to focus on what matters most. In contrast, business dashboards keep expanding in size and complexity, often distracting more than helping.

Dashboard evolution started with the promise of controlling your organization with the precision of a fighter jet. What happened is it overwhelmed your employees with excessive data. Now it keeps your IT team busy yet unproductive.

Problems with Dashboards

Dashboards are essentially reporting tools, yet in many real-world deployments, they fail even at that basic role. The core issue is that they are built on the assumption that more data means more value, which often leads to additional confusion for the intended user rather than helping to solve real problems.

Dashboards offer too much data. Humans get overwhelms when faced with too much data at once and machines should be tasked with monitoring data.
Dashboards have undefined actions. Observed data alone cannot determine the expected impact of actions which must be properly forecast.
Dashboards don't offer optimal decisions. reacting to data in real time can't guarantee the best results and they must be planned ahead of time by actual experts.

Actual Analytics Provide Solutions

Analytics solve business problems through a process far more involved than simply displaying data. Advanata plays a key role in simplifying this process and ensuring useful results. (Click images for technical details)

Overcoming dashboard problems starts with utilizing all three intelligence sources. Each source offers value that can help solve the problem. Humans define potential decisions, analysts calculate action effects, and machines optimize data reactions. This is the core of the Advanata inductive approach.
Next solution to dashboard problems is defining optimal actions. Actions should be planned in advance and optimized for every possible data scenario. Advanata's data effectiveness methodology takes data observations and transforms them into optimal actions.
Dashboard's excessive data is solved with an organized solution structure. Data representation must be concise and reflect the actual problem. Advanata's business problem framework consisting of goals, options and resources solves this issue.

What to do with Dashboards

Dashboards are useful in certain cases, such as providing transparency to external parties, reporting to management, or (perhaps) sharing research data internally. Beyond that, their role is limited. They are essentially well-formatted data reports and should not be expected to deliver much more.

Dashboards should only be used for monitoring, sharing and visibility. If actions need to be taken the proper analytics are required.

The importance of analytics to any business cannot be overstated. Analytics aren’t a luxury but a necessity for survival in a continuously evolving business world and providing overly complex tools or handing users endless data won’t achieve this goal. Advanata, with its underlying technologies, is built to help businesses not just adopt analytics but use them effectively and thrive.

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