Are Your Dashboards Dumb ?

Look at most presentations on business intelligence and you will see most of the emphasis on beautiful, jazzy dashboards - gauges, drill downs, ... They give you lots of factual information, but little help in figuring out what to do.

So most dashboards are actually dumb in the intelligence sense - they don't think, they don't give advice, and most times they don't even predict. Did your dashboards warn you about the big Wall Street crash? Or that your business would not get the capital it needed ? Or even that you should have cut your expenses 10% more than you did? Or that your sales demographics are changing big time?

Actually, I know that a few smart companies and hedge funds really do have "smart" dashboards - the kind of systems that reveal, predict, and advise.

At Tiger Nassau, we use the slogan "more than just dashboards" to emphasize that business intelligence should not be about fancy looking dashboard gauges, but rather, ... intelligence!

We are not yet at the point where computers can out think the average human - Big Blue, the chess game, wins against grand masters, but only because the rules of the game are constrained (size of board, number of pieces, types of moves, etc).

However, it's likely we are reaching, or have reached, the 80-20 point - where intelligent systems can sift thru or take you to the 80% point, freeing your brain to spend time on the last remaining 20% of really complex analysis and decision making. In short, your systems should be answering not only "what happened", but, "what is likely to happen", or even "what are the likely outcomes if we do x or y or z".

This is the key to your success for making highly productive, excellent decisions. So, are your dashboards intelligent or just dumb ?