What Are KPI Dashboards And Self-service Analytics Dashboards

KPI Dashboards

Let's look at the important difference between KPI dashboards and self-service analytics. I help companies with their performance management systems, I help them to find the right data to inform decision making. And what I find in practice is that there is a bit of confusion around the difference between self-service analytics and more curated KPI dashboards. If we look back, what we've had in the past is that companies had an analytics team that would look at some of the high-level KPIs, the strategic bits of data that companies and decision makers needed. And they would spend a lot of time during the months collecting and analyzing this data and then producing reports as the data volumes grew in companies. These reports got longer and longer and longer. And then suddenly you started to see bottlenecks that not everything could be analyzed properly. And then I felt that a lot of times analytics teams just dumped data onto decision makers. One way to get out of this was the promise of self-service analytics. So you take instead of having this analytics team doing all the analysis, why don't we give our business users a tool so they can analyze the data themselves, they can answer their business questions. And for me, we need to do two distinctly different things here. We still need to do these curated KPI dashboards where we look at the high level strategic goals of the organization and we need to figure out what data we want to use to help the decision makers to understand how well we're doing against those goals and how well as a business we are performing. And for this, I talk about this fine dining experience. So you go to a two or three star Michelin restaurant and you sit down and you get presented with a beautiful meal, that is, and the table that the plate is beautifully created and someone has thought about where to put the different components. So for me, this is what a KPI dashboard should be about. We should have teams thinking about what is the strategic information needs. How do we best visualize this data? What is the best graph or how do we turn this into a real story? So my analogy here is a newspaper front page where we talk about how we think about what is actually the headlines. We turn the data into a headline that an executive that is busy can easily read and say, OK, this is limited. I understand that we're not selling enough. I understand that our employees are really happy. Whatever the message is, then we need to bring in the picture. So we need to think about data visualization very effectively. And then we also need to think about storytelling on a front page. You will have a summary, a short narrative that captures the essence of the story. And this is, again, something I see missing from lots of KPI dashboards.

Self-service Analytics Dashboards

Now let's explore self-service analytics or what? The aim of this is that we give everyone in the organization access to data so they can make more data informed decisions. For me, this is a bit like a buffet experience. We walk onto a buffet and you put your meals together using different predefined components. So what I find is sometimes companies see this as simply dumping all their raw data into a big database, putting a nice front end of tools like Click and Tableau or power by on top and then say, simply go off and find your answers. The challenge is that business users often don't know how to answer their questions, what data to use and how to analyze it. So again, what we need to do is we need to do some handholding here and some preparation. So instead of dumping raw pasta and raw dough and and all the different ingredients into one place, hoping that people will find the answers and find a great meal from it, we will have precooked starters, different side dishes, different salads that are already prepared that I can then easily put together. So again, what we need here is a bit of preparation where you work with business users to say, what are some of the questions you have to have an answer to? And then you give them some guidance of how to put this together and maybe even some handholding. So if you think about a Buffet restaurant in the morning, they might have an omelet station where you go in and say, I would like to have this. I would like an omelet with cheese and bacon and a bit of this bit of that. Someone else comes along and say, I want salmon and dill in mind. What you then have is then to have a chef that will put it together for you and for me. This is something that is really important, that we still give people the ability to interact with an analytics team to say, how do I now use my self-service tool to find my answers? Or you give them the ingredients so they can put it together really well by themselves, and this is basically what I work on with lots of organizations where we sit down and say, what are your true information needs? What are your data needs? How can we curated the really important strategic information to really inform decision makers? And how can we make this experience for everyone else, really work so they can find the data they need and use it to inform their decision making. And for me, there's a lot of confusion in practice that I try to help to eliminate. If you find this interesting, I have lots more videos on my YouTube channel and lots of articles on my website where you can find out a lot more about any of these topics. I talk about KPI, I talk about data and everything else in between.