Your Dashboard Should Support the Decision Loop
I know… you must be confuse by the title. I confuse too at first when I hear it from my business stake holder. But let me explain.
During our lifetime as data professional, we are expected to do a lot of things. Thanks to the media and charlatan that depict that data is new oil, the demand for data professional skill skyrocket (at least in the last few year) and business expectation also going up.
Not only business stakeholder require that data professional to be able to make cool analysis and help improve company growth, they also expected to know the finer detail of data value chain. From sourcing, cleaning, and making output. Of course, one of the output that is expected is to create usable dashboard, not only fancy with nice visualisation, but remember…. usable.
The first think that the business stakeholder heard about dashboard is fancy visualisation, that only act as Thermometer, showing which KPIs is under index and which one is over index. The questions from stake holder is, what should they do next? Can they download the target audience in excel (yes… this is happened a lot) from the dashboard and doing something? The answer is probably not. The next action will be most likely asking the data team to provide data.
When I talk about usable, what I mean is, it is should be able to help the day to day operation, decision, monitoring and also what should to be done next. Without our intervention. Our dashboard should be powerful enough so a lot of process can be done by business stakeholder and minimise the analyst time for ad-hoc queries.
Now you know what closing the “Decision Loop” mean. The next questions is, is there any framework? Chart below is the simple version of the “Closing the Decision Loop” dashboard. Please note that this framework is marketing or sales development activity. Other corporate function such as supply chain or finance might have different steps, but I hope the idea is still the same.
Overall idea is, fist we need to have the business questions right. Build relationship with the business stakeholder to get their time, discuss deeply of what they want to achieve. No worries, business stakeholder usually already have something in mind. Those understanding of business questions that will be implemented in “the thermometer”.
Next, any business users can see where the problem is, thinking the action and select the correct audience. Once audience selected, the tactical program will be designed and launched. The work will be back to analyst to create monitoring dashboard and analyse the impact of the activity.
What is next? Maybe during our analysis, there will be KPIs that need to be added. We will comeback again to the first cycle to add additional KPIs in “the thermometer”. The team will observe again the corporate KPIs for further optimisation. And the cycle goes on.
What do you think? Do you think that the idea and framework are useful? Of course, any input to develop this framework will be very beneficial. Just let me know.
