How dashboard sprawl challenges upend enterprise analytics

When dueling dashboards create doubt

Matt Arellano has seen what happens when dashboards outpace governance.

Arellano, a senior vice president at IT services and consulting company Genpact, worked with a global retailer whose U.S. and European sales teams used separate analytics systems with dashboards that calculated gross sales differently. As a result, the teams reported inconsistent numbers to the finance department, "leaving a numerical problem for finance to figure out," Arellano said.

The conflicting calculations also meant the company didn't spend its marketing dollars efficiently and made it appear that the U.S. and European markets were performing differently, even though they were not, Arellano said.

Organizations have invested heavily in data platforms and business intelligence (BI) technologies , betting that analytics would yield clearer insights and, ultimately, faster, more informed business decisions. Yet trust in analytics results is slipping in many organizations, as is the value of data analysis, often due to dashboard sprawl.

The problem is widespread, said Boris Evelson, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

"The majority of organizations are still in the broken dashboard phase," Evelson said. "And the elephant in the room here is that as a result, no one can figure out what their ROI is on their data and analytics investments. This is one of the top complaints we hear [from clients]. They don't know how much they've gained for all their work. They're saying, 'We've got all these dashboards, but how do we know they're bringing us business value?'"

Why dashboard sprawl is rising

The typical organization has numerous dashboards. Several factors have contributed to their growth, according to experts.

First is the democratization of data, which extended access to data to employees across organizations rather than limiting it to skilled analytics professionals, such as BI developers and data scientists.

Second is the large enterprise investment in analytics tools that include dashboards.

Third is the growing availability of technologies that enable self-service users to easily create their own dashboards. As a result, many dashboards are built outside formal governance channels, which can lead to shadow analytics. Some dashboards are built by a particular user or team, used once and forgotten, becoming so-called zombie dashboards that burn up computing resources and licensing budgets without any ROI.

"The democratization of data and business intelligence, along with the low barrier of entry for creating new dashboards, has accelerated the sheer number of dashboards and reports that are produced and consumed," said Nick Kramer, principal of applied solutions at consultancy SSA & Company.

But it's not just the number of dashboards within an organization that's a problem, Kramer and others said. The bigger issue is inconsistent data definitions across dashboards -- a problem that stems from governance gaps.

"Companies may have data governance, but they don't extend it into their BI layer," Kramer said. "And you have a ton of dashboards being built, and they're also relatively ungoverned. So, you have different dashboards with an overlap in what they report, and they do it differently."

How dashboard sprawl hurts organizations

Dashboard sprawl negatively impacts an organization in multiple ways.

To start, dashboard sprawl adds unnecessary costs, said Doug Leal, vice president of data and analytics consulting at CGI, an IT and business consultancy. Duplicate tools and zombie dashboards incur excess licensing fees, require IT support and consume compute resources without providing sufficient -- or sometimes any -- benefits to justify the money spent on them.

Dashboard sprawl also has indirect costs, Leal explained. Because data definitions vary across multiple dashboards, different workers and teams produce conflicting reports. That leads to disputes over who has the right insights.

"There's an inability to make a decision. That leads to a lack of agility, and you become stagnant as an organization because you can't move forward," Leal said.

"The paralysis that comes with not knowing what the real answer is, is real," Kramer added.

That, in turn, wears away employee and executive trust in the organization's data, even if the data quality itself is sound.

"When you have multiple dashboards reporting the same metric, but they're not reporting the same number, [people] then don't trust the data. And the cost to turn that around and get them to trust the data again is huge," Leal said.

How leaders can rein in dashboard sprawl

Dashboard sprawl is not an indictment against dashboards themselves, nor even having a high number of them in an organization.

"Dashboards absolutely bring value. They are absolutely useful, and we cannot operate without them," Evelson said. "But there are too many dashboards created with expensive dollars that aren't being used or that are being used that provide signals without insight, so you can't act on them. That's the problem."

Evelson stressed that an organization shouldn't eliminate dashboards just to reduce the number; instead, it should aim to better govern them.

The goal of better governance is to reduce duplicate tools, enforce consistent data definitions and data quality, and retire dashboards when they're no longer needed or no longer provide value.

Those are challenging tasks, experts said.

To execute them effectively, experts said organizations must have a strong data governance operating model that includes metadata management and a semantic layer, and that enforces data stewardship and ownership. They also need asset management to inventory dashboards and a searchable catalog so teams can reuse existing ones.

Mary K. Pratt is an award-winning freelance journalist specializing in enterprise IT, cybersecurity strategy and data management.