Why BI Dashboards are Failing to Provide the Insight they Promised

No matter how far organisations may have progressed in their transition from a majority of decisions being made by instinct and intuition to primarily using data, the one thing most businesses seem to agree on is that data-driven decision-making is key to their organisation’s ability to compete in the market and meet its business goals.

95 per cent of the individuals we surveyed for this particular piece of research had some sort of enterprise BI or data analytics platform in place.

Is being data-driven enough to survive and prosper in an era when the rate of economic growth in many developed economies is slowing, and the outlook is generally one of uncertainty with a high degree of pessimism?

Some businesses have decided that the answer to this question is an emphatic “no” and are therefore choosing to become driven by insights rather than data. Insight-driven organisations better understand their customers (and those of their competitors) and try to continually improve their experience. They gain competitive advantage by building a holistic approach to BI and combining every stage from collection and preparation through to analysis, insight and action.

Analysts estimate that insight-driven businesses will be growing at anywhere between 27 and 40 per cent in the years ahead – despite the somewhat gloomy economic backdrop.

At the heart of the transition from data to insight is the dashboard. There has been quite the arms race in BI platform dashboard functionality with vendors falling over one another in their claims to be easier to use and more feature rich than ever before.

Computing surveyed approximately 100 business decision makers representing businesses ranging in size from fewer than 250 employees to those with many thousands, and from multiple industry sectors, in order to establish how BI dashboards are helping – or hindering – UK businesses in making the switch from being data-driven to insight-driven.

Are dashboards delivering insight when business users need it or are the dashboards the problem, as opposed to the solution?