November 13, 2012
The future of dashboards, if any
Business intelligence dashboards are frequently bashed. I slammed them back in 2006 and 2007. Mark Smith dropped the hammer last August. EIS, the most dashboard-like pre-1990s analytic technology, was also the most reviled. There are reasons for this disdain, but even so dashboards shouldn’t be dismissed entirely.
In essence, I’d say:
- Dashboards are overrated and oversold.
- They are useful even so.
- Their usefulness is ebbing as technology advances.
In particular:
- The metaphor of an automobile dashboard — or airplane cockpit — was always imperfect. A car’s dashboard shows you ALL information that can be surfaced, and also holds pretty much all your controls. But a BI dashboard is just a selective, surface view.
- BI dashboards have two basic uses — giving a snapshot view of what’s going on, and serving as a portal for further BI activity.
- The snapshot view can work well in human real-time scenarios such as stock quotes or network monitoring. Otherwise, the benefits of a snapshot are less clear.
- The portal use of a dashboard is conceptually solid, and I referred to it favorably in a recent BI taxonomy post. However, numerous user interface trends point toward single-chart/single-report BI, including:
- The smaller screens of mobile devices.
- The sophisticated drilldown of a Tableau or QlikView.
- Search-based BI navigation.
- Collaborative BI.
- Integration between BI and traditional packaged applications.
I’d further note that:
- Marketing departments are strong dashboard adopters — but they’re also strong adopters of most other analytic technologies, including the ones I cited as reasons to get away from dashboards.
- Irrespective of their later usefulness in production, dashboards demo really well.
And so my tentative view of dashboards’ future boils down to:
- I imagine that human real-time dashboards will be with us for a long time; even with great alerting technology, you’d want great dashboards as well for rapid information intake.
- I also think we’ll long have BI portals — and the less sophisticated or experienced a user is, the more useful a dashboard-like display could be in showing him which information options are available.
- Beyond those two use cases, I don’t know why we should expect that dashboard technology will ever be “fixed”.
Categories: Business intelligence, Investment research and trading, Log analysis
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Great post, Curt! I agree mobile drives many solutions towards single-chart, but the underlying need to pivot from one concern to the next is still there. So mobile will be a window to the dashboard, and navigation will account for that. Deep integration of search such that it drives the dashboard plus deals with text data (way) more flexibly than mining should help dashboards stay relevant.