Why dashboards need to be created for action not decisions

There's a strong perception that numbers will simply drive action but they don't. Look at most dashboards and they’re designed to tell you about your data but they don’t prompt you to do anything with it. That’s the missing piece in dashboard design.

Dashboards are built to communicate numbers but not to drive action. It’s very rare to see a dashboard that specifically drives action by end-users. They look at the data and then it's implicit that they have to go and do something somewhere else.

At Yellowfin, we believe that if you can integrate insights into a workflow a user will act on them immediately. This will give the business both understanding and outcomes. A business user can understand the data, what it means and why it's important and act on it immediately.

The most effective way to make dashboards action-oriented is to integrate the insights directly into your organization’s workflow. Rather than a dashboard being a passive conversation with the user, you can take the next step within your dashboard environment and do something.

This is one of the big differentiators of the Yellowfin dashboard. We now give businesses the ability to integrate actions directly into their workflow from a dashboard. This presents the end-user with information that they can act on immediately.

For example, you may build a dashboard that tells you what customers have and haven't bought from you over the last three months. Rather than just giving you a list to look at, you can click a button on the dashboard and ring each customer. After interacting with them you can then click another button on the dashboard and update it so you close the loop on that conversation and that record goes away.

Another way you can do this is to build your analytics into your own business process where that knowledge and insight are needed. We recently recommended this to a large banking organization we’ve worked with at Yellowfin. They've got 300 data scientists who are able to find amazing insights about their customers but they didn't have a way to update their operational systems with this information. So business bankers are sent a spreadsheet that they’re expected to act on, which isn’t helpful.

What they really need is an engaging data-driven platform that allows them to ship those insights directly to the front line. This would give the business banker clear calls to action - they click a button and call the customer directly. They can then talk to the customer about a new account or loan and act on it then and there.

It's easy to build a dashboard that tells you to do something, but being able to actually do something within the dashboard is a profound change. I think action-oriented platforms are the future of dashboards for organizations because they give business people the ability to actually make things happen.