A good part of my career has been spent building, implementing, using, training others on and generally dealing with business intelligence and dashboards. I’m one of the biggest advocates you will find for having formal business intelligence practices in place for all areas of a corporation. The biggest reason for this is that dashboards and BI generally can fill the gap where other technology/data systems are not integrated – including the robust use of spreadsheets.
Recently I’ve encountered the argument that dashboards are not actually technology. The argument goes that BI and dashboards are more closely related to spreadsheets than to formalized technology systems. Essentially dashboards are a different class of tool and can be treated less formally than other systems.
On the surface, I’m surprisingly open to this argument because one of the main purposes of dashboards is to bring data from other places and into the open. The argument that greater flexibility and less formality around dashboards holds merit.
However, I ultimately have to come down against this theory for a simple reason: when dashboards are done correctly they quickly become the official source people go to for data. Anything that is seen as an official source of data (even if the data comes from somewhere else) must be treated with a degree of formality and consistency. No one would ever implement SAP with the idea that a 2% error rate in the reporting was appropriate – it needs to be to the penny. The same theory holds for a dashboard reporting SAP financial data – it must be just as accurate and consistent.
Treating dashboards as something other than formalized technology presents the increasing opportunity to casually handle the formal data reporting processes. For this reason, dashboards should always be treated like every other technology system. If it isn’t going to be right and consistent, why is it being implemented?