Most businesses do not have a data problem. They have a decision problem dressed up as a data problem.
The symptom
Someone asks a simple question — which customers are we most exposed to, are we going to run out of stock, is this month better or worse than last — and the answer takes three days and two spreadsheets to produce. By the time it arrives, the moment has passed.
Why dashboards usually fail
Three reasons, in our experience:
- They are built around available data, not around decisions. If nobody can say what action a chart would trigger, the chart is decoration.
- They show too much. Forty metrics on one screen is not a dashboard, it is a haystack.
- Nobody owns them. The person who built it left, the data source changed, and now the numbers are quietly wrong.
A better starting point
Work backwards. Write down the five decisions your leadership team makes repeatedly. For each one, write the single number that would change the decision. That list is your dashboard. Everything else is a second page.
It is a deliberately small exercise, and it is the difference between reporting that gets used and reporting that gets ignored.