Written by Simon Hiel
Dashboards are great - web apps are brilliant!
From SMEs to international corporations, from CEOs to team leaders, every manager needs a source of data - a fact base - to make an informed decision. This source can be internal, e.g. past experience. Alternatively, this source could be external: ERP / CRM data, accounting data, HR data, market information, expert interviews, etc. The art of convincing employees, shareholders, investors or frankly any type of stakeholder to follow you as a manager in a specified direction requires an external data source, communicated with a healthy dose of passion and flare. These external sources are, however, unable to directly provide the desired insights, hence the design of expressive dashboards, where a selection of data is presented in a way that is more insightful for correct decision-making. But I am not here to talk about the history of dashboards. I’m here to talk about the next evolution in dashboarding, which is, if your organization wants future proof insight generation, to evolve to BrightWolves Digit’s web applications.
Long lasting dashboards require a combination of consulting excellence and technical expertise
The typical dashboards can (quickly) end up in the graveyard because of hasty implementation or bad maintenance.
They don’t generate the right insights
They are cluttered and imprecise, with too many visuals
They are just incorrect due to data quality issues
They are too expensive to share (licence fees)
You chose one solution and you are stuck with the supplier
They are hard to manage in terms of access control
They are not very expressive or not dynamic enough so users tend to go back to the source data
They were quick before, but now with all this new data, they have become too slow to respond
They are difficult to adjust when data sources adjust or change
They report on historic states and are not great for predicting what’s next
Dashboards may seem easy and straightforward to implement, but creating brilliant dashboards requires a combination of consulting excellence and technical expertise. Consulting excellence is more than listening to our clients. It’s about guiding our client towards the right insights, through workshops, discussions, strategic sessions, rapid co-development and is by no means linear thinking. Technical expertise is about recognizing and deploying the right technologies through and through. It therefore requires, within one team or person, a unique set of skills, to both be a strong communicator as well as a technical expert. At BrightWolves, we are unofficially dubbed “geek’s in disguise”, because you would never be able to tell that we are geeks, until we start talking about data. At BrightWolves Digit, we are Solution Engineers, because we solve your data challenges the engineering way.